Hypotheses, Evidence And Relationships: The Hyper Approach For Representing Scientific Knowledge Claims / quote 1 of 3
Epistemic value of nanopublications
What remains problematic is that even if we were to have a perfect representation of phrases into triplets, this collection of sentences still do not answer the question ‘what does p53 activate?’ An important omission of this representation is that we get no grip on the validity or the epistemic value of each sentence: does it contain new experimental knowledge, created by the author; is it a citation of accepted knowledge, or is the statement purely hypothetical? In other words, what is the author intent behind the statement? [..] To be able to accept these statements and add them to a knowledgebase, a user needs to be convinced that, first of all, the author intends a statement to be a plausible claim (as opposed, for instance, to a hypothetical claim, or a disputed citation), and secondly, that there is adequate backing for this claim. So two steps are needed: first, the assignment of epistemic status to a sentence (e.g. ‘known fact’ or ‘experimental result’ or ‘hypothesis’), and secondly, a link to the evidence the author has to support her claim. [..] ..we need to know where new knowledge is presented in the text, and how this knowledge is supported by evidence, either through experiments, or through references. What we would like to have is a list of claims or hypotheses, made by specific authors, some presentation of evidence for the hypothesis, as well as relationships connecting them, concerning a) the nature of the evidence and b) the relationship to other hypotheses. [...] What is critical here is the identification of new knowledge, claimed by the authors, vs. the elements on which this knowledge is based, in terms of experimental results and references to other work, and the underlying relationships.