GoTriple Platform

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 in nine European languages (Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish), which are currently scattered across local and discipline-specific repositories;
• 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.

Download the GoTriple Fact Sheet #1 here and watch this short video that showcases the GoTriple platform:

GoTriple was inspired by the Isidore search engine developed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). It will be 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 designed to be integrated into and thus to enrich the services of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for the SSH communities.

After a year of preparatory work, we started the actual development of the platform in early 2021. A first prototype of GoTriple (beta version) has been released in October 2021. It is accessible via the link 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 public interface or frontend – 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. Only aggregators interact with the GoTriple platform. The providers interact only with the aggregators.

A GoTriple aggregator is an organisation that collects, manages and disseminates the metadata of the scholarly resources made available by various providers. The aggregator operates as a standardisation body of heterogeneous metadata, either by defining its own requirements or by relying on existing standards for harvesting and dissemination.

By the end of the project, it is planned to have acquired data from the following aggregators: Isidore, OpenAIRE, Europeana, BASE, EKT, DOAJ, FBC, istex. As of autumn 2021, over 6 million items (publications) from 27 social sciences and humanities disciplines (based on the MORESS categories) in nine languages have already been ingested.

Innovative services and tools

In addition to the discovery features described above, users will 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, soon, 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”. 

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 Neuromedia.

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 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 will allow 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.