Semantic Indexing of Open Scientific Literature to Help Users Discover and Navigate through Publications Networks

In recent years, several evolutions have drastically transformed the way researchers as well as scientific and technical information (STI) services interact with scientific literature. The amount and pace of publications are skyrocketing, whether in journals and conferences or through pre-publication repositories (e.g., arxiv.org), such that it is increasingly difficult to keep up, find and make sense of relevant articles. Furthermore, the specialization of research communities makes it difficult to discover cross-disciplinary knowledge, which is essential to meet the growing demand of funding agencies for interdisciplinary projects. Scientific open archives are central in this landscape, however the keyword-based search services that they usually provide fail to grasp the semantic relationships between articles. Therefore, it is necessary to develop new tools that allow users to find their way in this mass of knowledge.