Nanopublications are "the smallest unit of publishable
information: an assertion about anything that can be uniquely
identified and attributed to its author".
The
nanopublication model was introduced to overcome the increasing
difficulties to retrieve, exchange and connect scientific results
with the underlying data, due to the ever-growing amount of
scientific papers and datasets. Moreover, a nanopublication is a
publication itself carrying all the information to be understood
and re-used by humans and individual atomic statements - i.e.,
assertions - represented as RDF triples. A nanopublication
comprehends all the information related to a single assertion and
it is structured into three main named graphs:
- the assertion graph containing the info related to the scientific statement central to the nanopublication;
- the provenance graph containing information about the origin and creation process of the assertion;
- the publication info graph including the metadata about the creation and publishing of the nanopublication.
These three named graphs are connected one to the other
by means of an additional named graph called the head
graph.
The main goals of the nanopublication model are
to promote interoperability among scientific results, to promote
data integration and trustworthiness, to ease the access to a
scientific statement and to enable the citation of atomic
statements allowing for fine-grained citation metrics on the
level of individual claims.