GoTriple: The innovative discovery service

GoTriple is an innovative multilingual discovery platform for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). It provides one of the central access points for discovering and reusing research artefacts that are relevant to the wide variety of disciplines under the umbrella domain of SSH: publications and research data, project descriptions and researcher profiles are automatically imported from aggregators and source providers, semantically enriched and linked in GoTriple.

The platform enables users to:

• discover and reuse open scholarly SSH resources, which are currently scattered across local and discipline-specific repositories, in multiple European languages;
• find and connect with other researchers and projects across disciplinary, cultural and language boundaries;
• make use of innovative tools and services to support research, visualisation of search results, web annotation, personalised recommendations and social networking;
• explore new ways of funding research such as crowdfunding.

As far as the multilinguality support in GoTriple is concerned, currently the platform:

• provides automatic classification of content upon ingestion in 11 languages, namely: Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian
• uses for the Automatic annotation the TRIPLE Vocabulary which provides a hierarchical set of over 3.300 SSH-related concepts in these 12 languages: Croatian, Dutch (partial), English, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian.
• presents its user interface localised in various languages, including English, Italian and French.

GoTriple was inspired by the Isidore search engine developed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). It is the Discovery Service of OPERAS, the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities in the European Research Area, and it is one of the services of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), specifically devoted to the SSH communities.

GoTriple is the main outcome of the European Research project TRIPLE (Transforming Research through Innovative Practices for Linked Interdisciplinary Exploration). TRIPLE has been funded under the Horizon 2020 framework and run from October 2019 until March 2023. For more information about the project please visit project.gotriple.eu.

GoTriple architecture

The GoTriple platform has a two-level architecture:

• the Core pipeline - this is where the data imported from aggregators is ingested, processed and enriched, and
• the Discovery Platform - this is what end users see when accessing the website gotriple.eu and where the imported data is made available (for searching, filtering, annotating, downloading etc.)

The GoTriple platform is the endpoint for a two-level data acquisition process comprising two distinct actors: providers and aggregators. The definition of aggregators and providers is primarily functional rather than technical: They are distinguished by the specific interaction, direct or indirect, with the GoTriple platform. Each aggregator delivers metadata harvested from its own sources, the providers. GoTriple harvests data both from aggregators (Isidore, BASE, DOAJ, OpenAIRE, EconStor) and providers alike (OpenEdition, Biblioteka Nauki, ETK, ZRC Sazu, Coimbra University, Clarin, Cessda etc).

Innovative services and tools

In addition to the discovery features described above, users have access to a variety of innovative services and tools which are not part of the GoTriple core. Instead, they are a mix of federated, tightly integrated and backend services as well as third party applications which enrich the user experience.

Visual Discovery System

The Visual Discovery System enables you to get an instant overview of your search results. The visualisations show the main research topics within the results at a glance as well as the development of these topics over time. By interacting with the visualisations, you can also access relevant documents and other resources linked to your search terms. This way, you can easily identify useful, pertinent information for your research interests.

The visual discovery system is developed by Open Knowledge Maps.

Annotation Service

The Annotation tool is a web-based tool that allows users to create annotations on web content, i.e. web pages and PDF documents accessed through a standard browser. A simplified definition of a web annotation is “a user note on a web page”. Everybody is familiar with the idea of “taking notes” on paper, e.g. on books, articles or magazines: we highlight or underline the important parts of the text and add comments on the border of the page or in other “white spaces” of the document. This activity is in fact often referred to as “marginalia”. Pundit supports highlighting, commenting, tagging but also applying semantic annotations to web documents.

The TRIPLE Open Annotation Tool is based on Pundit (https://thepund.it/), a system that has been developed by Net7 since 2012.

Trust Building System

The Trust Building System (TBS) is a referral system that is curated by humans. Its purpose is to help SSH researchers on all career levels detect and connect to reliable partners for multi-stakeholder cooperation, e.g. for interdisciplinary collaboration to explore funding opportunities, for transdisciplinary collaboration to include pilot communities in research projects, to pitch projects, to find the right expert or coordinators for Horizon Europe consortiums.

The Trust Building System (TBS) is developed by MEOH and Nuromedia .

Recommender System

The Recommender System collects, models and exploits user and context data from multiple sources such as publication content, user profile information and interaction data. Based on these data, it provides personalised recommendations of items (e.g., scientific literature, research data and projects) and users (e.g., research peers), thus helping researchers to expand their research network and resources.

The Recommender System is developed by Know-Center.

Crowdfunding Platform

The Crowdfunding Platform allows researchers to share their projects ideas widely and to find funding from citizens. It is a great way to strengthen the links between research and society. Crowdfunding initiatives can prove particularly suitable to fund small-scale research activities, which can be accomplished with limited investments but need a quick timing to be performed successfully.

For the integration of a crowdfunding platform into GoTriple, the TRIPLE project is collaborating with wemakeit.