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Research data publishing is today widely regarded as crucial for reproducibility, proper assessment of scientific results, and as a way for researchers to get proper credit for sharing their data. However, several challenges need to be solved to fully realize its potential, one of them being the development of a global standard for links between research data and literature. Current linking solutions are mostly based on bilateral, ad hoc agreements between publishers and data centers. These operate in silos so that content cannot be readily combined to deliver a network graph connecting research data and literature in a comprehensive and reliable way. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Publishing Data Services Working Group (PDS-WG) aims to address this issue of fragmentation by bringing together different stakeholders to agree on a common infrastructure for sharing links between datasets and literature. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper presents the synergic effort of the RDA PDS-WG and the OpenAIRE infrastructure toward enabling a common infrastructure for exchanging data-literature links by realizing and operating the Data-Literature Interlinking (DLI) Service. The DLI Service populates and provides access to a graph of data set-literature links (at the time of writing close to five million, and growing) collected from a variety of major data centers, publishers, and research organizations.

To achieve its objectives, the Service proposes an interoperable exchange data model and format, based on which it collects and publishes links, thereby offering the opportunity to validate such common approach on real-case scenarios, with real providers and consumers. Feedback of these actors will drive continuous refinement of the both data model and exchange format, supporting the further development of the Service to become an essential part of a universal, open, cross-platform, cross-discipline solution for collecting, and sharing data set-literature links.

This realization of the DLI Service is the first technical, cross-community, and collaborative effort in the direction of establishing a common infrastructure for facilitating the exchange of data set-literature links. As a result of its operation and underlying community effort, a new activity, name Scholix, has been initiated involving the technological level stakeholders such as DataCite and CrossRef.

There are very few individuals who have studied the question of weights and measures who do not most strongly favour the decimal system. The disadvantages of the weights and measures at present in use in the United Kingdom are indeed manifold. At the very commencement of life the schoolboy is expected to commit to memory the conglomerate mass of facts and figures which he usually refers to as “Tables,” and in this way the greater part of twelve months is absorbed. And when he has so learned them, what is the result? Immediately he leaves school he forgets the whole of them, unless he happens to enter a business‐house in which some of them are still in use; and it ought to be plain that the case would be very different were all our weights and measures divided or multiplied decimally. Instead of wasting twelve months, the pupil would almost be taught to understand the decimal system in two or three lessons, and so simple is the explanation that he would never be likely to forget it. There is perhaps no more interesting, ingenious and useful example of the decimal system than that in use in France. There the standard of length is the metre, the standard of capacity the cubic decimetre or the litre, while one cubic centimetre of distilled water weighs exactly one gramme, the standard of weight. Thus the measures of length, capacity and weight are most closely and usefully related. In the present English system there is absolutely no relationship between these weights and measures. Frequently a weight or measure bearing the same name has a different value for different bodies. Take, for instance, the stone; for dead meat its value is 8 pounds, for live meat 14 pounds; and other instances will occur to anyone who happens to remember his “Tables.” How much simpler for the business man to reckon in multiples of ten for everything than in the present confusing jumble. Mental arithmetic in matters of buying and selling would become much easier, undoubtedly more accurate, and the possibility of petty fraud be far more remote, because even the most dense could rapidly calculate by using the decimal system.

The latest information from the magazine chemist is extremely valuable. He has dealt with milk‐adulteration and how it is done. His advice, if followed, might, however, speedily bring the manipulating dealer before a magistrate, since the learned writer's recipe is to take a milk having a specific gravity of 1030, and skim it until the gravity is raised to 1036; then add 20 per cent. of water, so that the gravity may be reduced to 1030, and the thing is done. The advice to serve as “fresh from the cow,” preferably in a well‐battered milk‐measure, might perhaps have been added to this analytical gem.

The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the tools for constructing and operating aggregative infrastructures (systems for aggregating data sources with heterogeneous data models and technologies) in a cost-effective way. Designers and developers can select from a variety of D-NET data management services, can configure them to handle data according to given data models, and can construct autonomic workflows to obtain personalized aggregative infrastructures.

The paper provides a definition of aggregative infrastructures, sketching architecture, and components, as inspired by real-case examples. It then describes the limits of current solutions, which find their lacks in the realization and maintenance costs of such complex software. Finally, it proposes D-NET as an optimal solution for designers and developers willing to realize aggregative infrastructures. The D-NET architecture and services are presented, drawing a parallel with the ones of aggregative infrastructures. Finally, real-cases of D-NET are presented, to show-case the statement above.

The D-NET software toolkit is a general-purpose service-oriented framework where designers can construct customized, robust, scalable, autonomic aggregative infrastructures in a cost-effective way. D-NET is today adopted by several EC projects, national consortia and communities to create customized infrastructures under diverse application domains, and other organizations are enquiring for or are experimenting its adoption. Its customizability and extendibility make D-NET a suitable candidate for creating aggregative infrastructures mediating between different scientific domains and therefore supporting multi-disciplinary research.

D-NET is the first general-purpose framework of this kind. Other solutions are available in the literature but focus on specific use-cases and therefore suffer from the limited re-use in different contexts. Due to its maturity, D-NET can also be used by third-party organizations, not necessarily involved in the software design and maintenance.