Semantic Science: Publication Beyond the PDF

Scientific papers have evolved since the establishment of the Royal Society in the mid-17
^th
century. Today, despite the interconnectedness of Internet discourse, scientific papers are released as relatively static, inflexible artifacts, to wit, as Portable Document Format (PDF) files. This fact is an egregious slight to the base principle of science: that it is to be mutable and evolutionary. Thus, the present paper proposes a means of writing scientific papers that allows for change and explicit connection to other papers, through the use of (1) Linked Data knowledge graphs, (2) the Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable (FAIR) data principles, (3) the Markdown language, and (4) OpenAI“s Large Language Model, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, GPT -4. A handful of extant tools exist; these will be introduced in turn. The present paper cogently synthesizes the topic at hand and calls for science to be semantic.