Anchors in Shifting Sand: the Primacy of Method in the Web of Data

Abstract

Is the Linkded Data Web ready for people to use open government data or scientific datasets to do reproducible research? For one thing, practice and support for versioning have not yet emerged. In this paper we propose that we also need the "methods" by which results are obtained to be first class citizens in the Web of Data, so that they can be shared and discussed and so that results can be explained, interpreted and reused. We discuss our experience of the myExperiment.org Web Site, a social network of people sharing reusable methods for processing research data, with mechanisms for discovering, sharing, enacting, versioning and curation.