Towards a Cloud-Based Service for Maintaining and Analyzing Data About Scientific Events

TL;DR

This paper introduces OpenResearch, a cloud-based platform for managing, analyzing, and sharing comprehensive data on scientific events, enabling insights into trends, quality, and research impact through semantic data analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel cloud service that centralizes and structures scientific event data, supporting analysis and web archiving to facilitate research and transparency.

Findings

Enables continuous analysis of conference data trends

Provides a semantic repository accessible via SPARQL

Supports systematic exploration of research articles and citations

Abstract

We propose the new cloud-based service OpenResearch for managing and analyzing data about scientific events such as conferences and workshops in a persistent and reliable way. This includes data about scientific articles, participants, acceptance rates, submission numbers, impact values as well as organizational details such as program committees, chairs, fees and sponsors. OpenResearch is a centralized repository for scientific events and supports researchers in collecting, organizing, sharing and disseminating information about scientific events in a structured way. An additional feature currently under development is the possibility to archive web pages along with the extracted semantic data in order to lift the burden of maintaining new and old conference web sites from public research institutions. However, the main advantage is that this cloud-based repository enables a comprehensive analysis of conference data. Based on extracted semantic data, it is possible to determine quality estimations, scientific communities, research trends as well the development of acceptance rates, fees, and number of participants in a continuous way complemented by projections into the future. Furthermore, data about research articles can be systematically explored using a content-based analysis as well as citation linkage. All data maintained in this crowd-sourcing platform is made freely available through an open SPARQL endpoint, which allows for analytical queries in a flexible and user-defined way.