Seminar
PsychoModels and other infrastructural ideas for cumulative knowledge integration
- Noah van Dongen
- Date
- Friday 23 October 2026
- Time
- Series
- CWTS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Willem Einthoven
Kolffpad 1
2333 BN Leiden - Room
- Online & common rooms at CWTS
About the seminar
Scientific knowledge is, or at least can be, organized around theories, models, and empirical phenomena, but these objects are often difficult to find, compare, connect, and reuse. We are exploring how open research infrastructure could better represent these objects and their relationships. Our first step has been PsychoModels, an open repository for formal models in psychological science. Building PsychoModels has raised broader methodological and infrastructural questions about how models should be documented and represented, how they can be linked to publications, code, data, and other research objects, and how such information can be made openly accessible and interoperable.
In this seminar, we will present the history and current state of PsychoModels. We will then use our experience developing PsychoModels to speculate on broader plans for a Theory Builder Platform: an open infrastructure connecting formal models, scientific theories, empirical phenomena, and the evidence and research objects associated with them. Rather than presenting a finished solution, we will discuss where we are now, where we would like to go, and the problems we encounter in getting there. Both the particulars of PsychoModels and the big picture of the Theory Builder Platform. In particular, I hope to discuss questions around metadata and knowledge representation, repository and open-access infrastructure, interoperability with existing databases and scholarly infrastructure, automation and APIs, and the longer-term governance and sustainability of such platforms.
About the speaker
Noah van Dongen is an Assistant Professor of Methodology and Statistics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a methodologist at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on scientific theory development and on developing methods and infrastructure that can support it, including formal modelling, theory construction, and the representation and evaluation of scientific theories. He is one of the developers of PsychoModels and is currently working on the broader Theory Builder Platform, which aims to make scientific theories, models, and empirical phenomena easier to represent, connect, evaluate, and reuse.