Towards an Open Infrastructure for Supporting Relationship Discovery Between Scholarly Assets

There has been significant investment in the development of infrastructure for the curation and discovery of scientific assets, as demonstrated by the increasing number of institutional repositories and catalogues. However, despite this investment, it still remains very difficult to explore the relationships between these assets. For example, there is often no standard mechanism for a researcher to make available relationships between the findings presented in a publication and a dataset that was used as part of the analysis. There are examples where studies have needed to use text mining techniques to explore the literature to determine these relationships. This information is important for funders to demonstrate the usefulness of a dataset. It also useful for researchers to find other work relating to a dataset that may be important to consider for future work. Here we present our work to develop an approach and tooling to allow relationships to be expressed in a standard and open way. We discuss the use of ‘Research Objects’ to aggregate artefacts and to provide information about sources of metadata. We also discuss our plans for a distributed infrastructure that negates the need to support management by a single central organisation.