Documenting and sharing scientific research over the semantic web

Scientific team members often publish datasets, posters, workflows, and publications at different locations over the Web. If they were to share their information structured and linked over the Semantic Web, they could take advantage of the benefits of automated search, integration and reasoning. Despite producing related information, helping scientists annotate and link information related to a particular research effort on the Semantic Web can be a challenge. What is difficult to track is an overall understanding about the results of the team, e.g., publications, datasets, discussions, etc., the implicit relationships about those results and the resources involved in obtaining them. Having this information might help to understand and contextualize results, e.g., knowing when a publication located in a publication Website describes a dataset published at a data management site, as well as enable automated processing on the information as a whole. This paper will discuss a methodology to guide the process of documenting research efforts and sharing them over the Semantic Web as semi-structured inter-related collections. We have implemented this methodology as the CI-Server Framework to facilitate sharing research information for scientific groups at the Cyber-ShARE Research Center of Excellence. This approach facilitates and promotes documenting research efforts early in the research process, as opposed to being performed as a step subsequent to research, when information may be forgotten or lost.