Dr. Ina Blümel, Gabriel Birkei-Know conference

September 18, 2014

Taming the Wilderness of Open Research InformationStudent project at HS Hannover, participants: Wendinda Carine Donessonne, Felix Kommnick, Elena Liventsova, Rahima Medshid, Bengt Olschewski, Anna Petersmeier, Tatiana Walther, Jana Wolf

Research Information: Paradigms

• Institutional• research management as driving force: reporting tools, etc. • mostly proprietary CRIS implementations at institutional and partly

national level, … (Pure, Converis, et al)• “closed world”

• Community based / discovery layer• merging & linking research information from various sources• Supporting scientists to establish networks, see success of

ResearchGate, academia.edu, etc.

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VIVO

• Model for linkable research information with LOD ontologies

• Open source software• Originally developed at Cornell with

NSF funding, now supported by a consortium at DuraSpace

• Numerous implementations, previously primarily in the English-language bio/medical area (CTSA)

• Research profiles, visualisations, …

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“feed” VIVO

1. External data sources, esp. websites (harvesting)

2. Internal data sources (Web API or other type of access)

3. Individual customization to suit professional needs

Challenge: • From the vast array of research inf. objects on the web to

structured research information • If possible, automatically

Sources

Science 2.0 community• Websites with publications,

projects, information about organizations, persons, ...

• with structured and unstructured information

Identify websites with repetitive, similarly structured content, worth setting up a harvesting pipeline!

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Setting, Task

• 16 weeks project• 6th semester bachelor students of library and information

science• supported by an information and a computer scientist

• identify and document research information items on the websites

• map to the VIVO ontology

• certain steps re-defined or split up during running project according to students needs / prior knowledge

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Steps

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Challenges

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• inconsistent publication data, entered as freeform text in CMS, e.g., up to 13 different versions of journal volume representation

• templates don’t provide RI in machine-readable formats

Challenges

• Variable content, stable structures  • Duplicates with different structure (publications, persons, …)

http://www.hiig.de/ausgewahlte-publikationen/ http://www.hiig.de/ausgewaehlte-veroffentlichungen/

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Man and machine drawing same conclusions?

http://www.hiig.de/kooperationen/

Partners are marked with a logo (image) Luckily „alt“-tags available

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Challenges

Results

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• Discovery layer with aggregated research information

• Also approach for bootstrapping institutional research information systems from available web sources

• no substitute, but complementary to those systems

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• Community building• VIVOcamp13, first workshop for EU VIVO community, SWIB13 satellite

November 2013• VIVO Bootcamp at ELAG Conference (European Library Automation

Group) in Bath, June 2014, „hands-on„• euroCRIS LOD group participation

• Policy & Standards Making: Position paper DINI AG FIS• Supervising bachelor thesis for extending VIVO ontology• DFG application: “German Academic Web”

Some activities (beside VIVO implementation)

Thank you for your attention!