A Claim node for scientific documents

The open publishing ecosystem is converging on a shared set of standards, and none of them can represent the individual claims a paper makes. This section states what each one requires, how a claim tree maps onto it, and what the mapping costs — so that the people who maintain these schemas can see what we believe about them and correct us.

The gap

OXA defines headings, paragraphs, images, code blocks and citations — but not the propositions those elements are arguing for. CiTO types the relationships between papers — but not between the claims within one. Discourse Graphs defines Claim and Evidence nodes — but as a note-taking ontology, not as elements embedded in a published document. MIRA comes closest, with Claim, Evidence, Question and Study as first-class nodes.

What is missing is a Claim node: a typed, addressable element inside a scientific document carrying a proposition, a role in the argument, an anchor to a figure panel, and typed edges to other claims. This corpus is 289 of them across 10 papers, with 916 typed relations, which is the evidence that the thing is constructible.

How to read a tab

Every format answers the same six questions in the same order. Where one has no answer, its page says so rather than filling the space.

  1. 1 What it is
  2. 2 What it requires
  3. 3 How a claim tree maps onto it
  4. 4 Does it validate
  5. 5 What it cannot carry
  6. 6 What we would ask its authors

The fourth is the one worth having. An export that nobody has validated is a claim about a schema rather than a use of it, and the split between violations that are ours and violations that are the schema’s is the whole finding.

The formats

Ours — The claim format What a claim is, and what may be said about one. The format the other four map from. reference MIRA — Modular Interoperable Research Attribution The discourse-graph schema eLife’s article platform reads. reference OXA — Open Exchange Architecture The document format behind Curvenote, Stencila and eLife. Our Claim node is a proposal to it. proposal CiTO — Citation Typing Ontology Forty typed relations between documents. Six of ours map directly; eight need extensions. sketch Discourse Graphs Questions, Claims, Evidence and Sources. We emit it; the mapping lives only in code. sketch

The depth marker is honest rather than decorative. reference means the schema has been read and the exports validated against it; proposal means we are asking for a change rather than reading one; sketch means the mapping exists in code and has not been written up.