ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the background concerning semantic modeling of scientific resources and introduces the Linked Open Data University of Münster initiative. The way scientific results are published needs to be improved. First of all, scientific research settings have changed dramatically toward a digital environment, which calls for changes to traditional, paper-based publishing. The vision of the Semantic Web introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in 2001 is based on the idea of making content on the web machine understandable. The transition from the level of character sequences to a level of meaning is supposed to provide new opportunities for improving interoperability, search, and intelligent applications. The basic prerequisite for communication is a basic common and shared understanding. In the vision of the Semantic Web, ontologies play a major role in the chain. Linked Science is an approach where scientific resources—for example, workflows, processes, models, data, methods, and evaluation metrics—are semantically annotated and interconnected.
