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Advances in semantic authoring and publishing
Dissemination can be seen as a communication process between sci-entists. Over the course of several publications, they expose andsupport their findings, while discussing claims stated in these publi-cations. Unfortunately, such discourse structures are trapped withinthe content of the publications, thus making the semantics discover-able only by humans, and only by reading the publications. In ad-dition, the lack of advances in scientific publishing, where electronicpublications are still used as simple projections of paper documents,combined with the current growth in the amount of scientific researchbeing published, transforms the process of finding relevant literatureinto a cumbersome task.The solution relies in taking advantage of the full support pro-vided by electronic publications and making the different discoursestructures explicit. Consequently, the resulting knowledge becomescrystallised and can be shared with and by others. From a technolog-ical perspective, Semantic Web technologies provide viable ways forrepresenting this knowledge in a machine-understandable form, as se-mantic metadata, and for transforming simple electronic publicationsinto semantic publications.The work in this thesis is about paving the way towards aSe-mantic Publishing Ecosystemby developingSemantic Authoring andPublishingmechanisms, with the generic goal of alleviating, at leastpartly, the information overload problem. More concretely,Seman-tic Authoringis about enriching scientific publications with explicitrhetorical and argumentation discourse structures, in addition to ex-plicit linear structure for identification and localisation, and biblio-graphic information, while authoring the publication. At the sametime,Semantic Publishingis about creating semantic publications,by embedding these structures encoded as semantic metadata, intothe publication documents. Additionally, Semantic Publishing willalso include the publishing, use and retrieval of semantic publicationson the Web.Our hypothesis is that, the Semantic Authoring and Publishingprocesses bring added value to researchers and improve their dailyactivities by enabling new functionalities for structuring, retrievingand browsing scientific publications. Furthermore, based on Seman-
viiitic Authoring and Publishing, the rhetorical and argumentation dis-course structures can be formalised and made machine-interpretableusing knowledge representation technology. We devise solutions that:capture information present in scientific publications according to itsstructural, rhetorical and argumentation roles; acquire such informa-tion based on manual and automatic approaches, the latter with asatisfactory efficiency; and store, publish and expose the resulted se-mantic publications in a machine and human processable way
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