Rick Szostak receives a Trans-Atlantic Platform Award

The Trans-Atlantic Platform is a consortium of granting agencies in North America and Europe. It allows researchers from at least three different countries to collaborate in grant proposals. Rick worked with Richard Smiraglia of the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and Andrea Scharnhorst of the University of Amsterdam on this proposal. The three-year grant will allow the three researchers to investigate the use of Linked Open Data across the social sciences and humanities, and then suggest better strategies for researchers to publish their work as Linked Open Data, and computers to then draw connections across the data and insights of diverse scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Computers can only detect connections if researchers employ the same terminology (or easily translatable terminology) and coding practices. Though the grant is international, each researcher manages funds from their own national granting agency - in Rick's case from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The grant allows Rick to build on previous research in the fields of information science and interdisciplinary studies in which he has long sought to facilitate interdisciplinary discovery (as in his co-authored 2016 books, Interdisciplinary Knowledge Organization, and Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory). He will with this grant translate his own Basic Concepts Classification into Linked Open Data and explore the advantages of this classification in facilitating interdisciplinary connections with Linked Open Data.