Geospatial Metadata for Discovery in Scholarly Publishing

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/5.5590
Keywords: accessibility, scholarly publishing, discovery, geospatial, OJS

Abstract

Many scientific articles are related to specific regions of the Earth. The connection is often implicit, although geospatial metadata has been shown to have positive effects, such as detecting biases in research coverage or enhancing discovery of research. Scholarly communication platforms lack an explicit modelling of geospatial metadata. In this work, we report a novel approach to integrate well-defined geospatial metadata into Open Journal Systems (OJS). Authors create complex geometries to represent the related location(s) or region(s) for their submission and define the relevant time period. They are assisted by an interactive map and a gazetteer to capture high quality coordinates as well as a matching textual description with high usability. The geospatial metadata is published within the article pages using semantic tags, integrated in standardised publication metadata, and shown on maps. Thereby, the geoOJS plugin facilitates indexing by search engines, can improve accessibility, and provides a foundation for more powerful map-based discovery of research articles across journals.

See the Extended Abstract PDF for more details.

Author Biographies

Tom Niers, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster

Tom is a student at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany. He is currently writing his bachelor thesis. Furthermore he develops as a student assistant in the project Opening Reproducible Research (https://o2r.info) possibilities to improve reproducible research.

Daniel Nüst, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster

Daniel is a researcher at Spatio-temporal Modelling Lab at the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) at the University of Münster. He works on open tools and processes to enable and improve computational reproducibility in the project Opening Reproducible Research (o2r, https://o2r.info/).

References

Howell, R. G., Petersen, S. L., Balzotti, C. S., Rogers, P. C., Jackson, M. W., & Hedrich, A. E. (2019). Using webgis to develop a spatial bibliography for organizing, mapping, and disseminating research information: a case study of quaking aspen. Rangelands, 41(6), 244–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rala.2019.10.001

Karl, J. W. (2019). Mining location information from life-and earth-sciences studies to facilitate knowledge discovery. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 51(4), 1007–1021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000618759413

Karl, J. W., Herrick, J. E., Unnasch, R. S., Gillan, J. K., Ellis, E. C., Lutters, W. G., & Martin, L. J. (2013). Discovering ecologically relevant knowledge from published studies through geosemantic searching. BioScience, 63(8), 674–682. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2013.63.8.10

Kmoch, A., Uuemaa, E., Klug, H., & Cameron, S. G. (2018). Enhancing location-related hydrogeological knowledge. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 7(4), 132. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi7040132

Margulies, J. D., Magliocca, N. R., Schmill, M. D., & Ellis, E. C. (2016). Am- biguous geographies: connecting case study knowledge with global change science. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3), 572– 596. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1142857

Shapiro, J. T., & Báldi, A. (2012). Lost locations and the (ir) repeatability of ecological studies. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 10(5), 235–236. https://doi.org/10.1890/12.WB.015

Young, A. L., & Lutters, W. G. (2017). Infrastructuring for cross-disciplinary synthetic science: Meta-study research in land system science. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 26(1-2), 165–203. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9267-z

Published
2020-09-30
Issue
No 4 (2020): The 15th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2020
Section
Presentations

Copyright (c) 2020 Tom Niers, Daniel Nüst

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  • Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).