Science Stories

Science Stories brings scientific work into social spaces where users discover information about underrepresented pioneers — creating starting points for further exploration. For institutions with cultural heritage resources in libraries, archives, museums and galleries that are not yet available on the web, we provide a web application that leverages Wikidata, and semantic web technologies to demonstrate a vision of what getting scientific work products into social spaces can do. Images capture human attention. When digital images circulate on the web, people often gather information from the visual content alone. There may be embedded metadata in an image, perhaps automatically generated by the digital camera the photographer used. People do not often embed descriptive metadata into digital images they share online. The standards for image application programming interfaces (APIs) that the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIF) created provide guidance for how to communicate descriptive, technical, and administrative metadata along with images on the web. We introduce a proof-of-concept application to demonstrate the power of publishing images and structured data to tell stories. We tell science stories in this application related to the lives of women involved in scientific research, many of these stories have not yet been told on the web, we aim to raise their profile. Science Stories is a linked data application powered by structured data. The facts about the lives of the women whose science stories we are telling are syndicated from the Wikidata knowledge base. Content stored in Wikidata is machine-readable linked open data, and is published under a Creative Commons Zero license. We added references to the statements we contributed to Wikidata to published source materials so that others can quickly locate additional information. We demonstrate how free software and open standards can be leveraged to create visually appealing, interactive, information experiences which allow people to extend science communication to additional social spaces on the web. Images are an important component of scientific communication. Images draw human viewers in, and captivate interest. Science communication of the twenty-first century allows us to reconnect images with descriptive, technical, and administrative metadata in a web presentation, and to combine these images with structured statements in the web of linked data backed by references to published sources. This application combines structured data from Wikidata, and images published in conformance to the specifications. This novel combination of conceptual and technical infrastructure allows us to explicitly connect these science stories to reference materials.