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Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2018 Vol.44 189

urgently. Based on the existing concepts, classifications and descriptions, we further clarified the
connotation of knowledge unit. From the perspective of knowledge production and creation, the
knowledge unit is divided into three types which include common-sense knowledge unit, citation-
based knowledge unit and innovative knowledge unit. And then, from the point of theoretic and
empirical analysis, we proved the hypothesis of “a knowledge unit is the logical combination of N
(N≥1, N is a positive integer) semantic triples”. In addition, in order to promote the management
and use of knowledge unit, we construct the semantic description model of knowledge unit
referring to the idea of nanopublication.
Knowledge unit refers to the smallest unit of content that expresses a relatively complete set of
specific knowledge semantically. Common-sense knowledge unit is a generally acknowledged
basic knowledge content in public domain and professional subject area. Its citation often does
not need to explain or label specific sources and is used to prove the innovative knowledge unit.
Citation-based knowledge unit refers to the text content unit that can represent the citation of
references. Citation-based units are usually used to demonstrate or support innovative knowledge
unit. Corresponding to common-sense unit and citation-based unit, the innovation knowledge
unit is innovative professional knowledge, which is a new discovery or new cognition about the
specific problem. The innovation knowledge unit can be decomposed into at least one semantic
triples of subject, predicate and object. There are logical relations such as coordinate, conditional,
explicative, causal, progressive and comparative relations among the N (N≥1, N is a positive
integer) semantic triples of one knowledge unit. Meanwhile, there are also semantic relations such
as synonym relation and implication relation.
The description model of knowledge unit consists of content of knowledge unit, provenance and
supporting information of content, and publication information of knowledge unit. The content
of knowledge unit is a scientific discovery or core scientific conclusion in the document. And it
contains three description elements: subject, predicate and object. The publication information is
the metadata about the knowledge unit itself. The description elements of publication information
mainly include ID, name, creator, creation organization, creation time, regulatory agency
and version number of knowledge unit. Supporting information is the background or context
information of the content of knowledge unit, which is used to ensure its scientificity and accuracy.
Descriptive elements of supporting information mainly include the research method, research data,
research object, research tool and theoretical basis for generating innovative knowledge units, as
well as the preconditions for the establishment of knowledge unit. Provenance information is the
source characteristic information of knowledge unit content, which is used to ensure its traceability,
trustworthiness and innovativeness, and to ensure the intellectual property of its creator. The
description elements of provenance information mainly include source literature, source journals,
source authors, type, language and publishing time.
Due to limited space, this paper selects only one Chinese paper and one English paper in this
subject area for case study. In the follow-up, a large sample of examples will be selected to explore