In this paper we describe cLODg (conference Linked Open Data generator), a set of tools to collect, re ne and produce Linked Data to describe a scienti c conference and its publications, participants and events. cLODg is an open source project, which has the aim to encourage conference metadata publication and foster collaborative e orts in this direction between researchers and publishers.
A good practise in the semantic Web community is to encourage the publication
\eating our own dog food" [
There are two main challenges to pursue this task: (i) the knowledge of available vocabularies to represent the data and (ii) the availability of tools to ease the task of data acquisition, conversion, augmentation, veri cation and nally publication.
In this work we present cLODg (conference Linked Open Data generator), a tool that provides a formalized process for the conference metadata publication work ow. cLODg is an Open Source solution currently under development4, which has been used to gather and publish metadata for ESWC20145 and ESWC20156.
The main contributions of cLODg is a formalized, open source work ow which provides: (i) Facilities to gather/convert conference data from di erent source formats. (ii) The possibility to represent such data using di erent vocabularies. ? Part of this research has been sponsored by the EPSRC funded project LODIE:
Linked Open Data for Information Extraction, EP/J019488/1 3 SWDF: http://data.semanticweb.org 4 https://github.com/AnLiGentile/cLODg 5 http://2014.eswc-conferences.org/ 6 http://2015.eswc-conferences.org/ (iii) Facilities to involve conference participants in the loop and allow the collection of additional information and the veri cation of automatically generated data. (iv) Facilities to represent additional and non-conventional information, not currently captured by existing vocabularies, using Ontology Patterns7. (v) The serialization of data in di erent output formats, including e cient representations for mobile app consumption.
The main advantage is the open source and modular nature of the work, with the primary goal to encourage the collaboration between researchers and publishers towards increasing the availability of structured scholarly data. 2
The rst considerable e ort to o er comprehensive semantic descriptions of
conference events is represented by the metadata projects at ESWC 2006 and ISWC
2006 conferences [
Increasing number of initiatives are pursuing the publication about
conferences data as Linked Data, mainly promoted by publishers such as Springer8
or Elsevier9 amongst many others. For example, the knowledge management of
scholarly products is an emerging research area in the Semantic Web eld known
as Semantic Publishing [
Despite these continuous e orts, it has been argued that lots of
information about academic conferences is still missing or spread across several sources
in a largely chaotic and non-structured way and a viable solution is a strong
cooperation between researchers and publishers [
The cLODg tool - publishing Conference Semantic
Data
Conference metadata collected from di erent unstructured and semi-structured
resources must be expressed with appropriate vocabularies to be exposed as
linked data. cLODg currently implements two data representations: one that
7 ontologydesignpatterns.org
8 http://lod.springer.com/wiki/bin/view/Linked+Open+Data/About
9 http://data.elsevier.com/documentation/index.html
strictly follows the Semantic Web Conference ontology [
The cLODg work ow consists of four main steps: 1. Data acquisition 2. Data conversion and integration 3. Data augmentation and veri cation 4. Linked Data Publication
Data acquisition is currently supported from (i) proprietary XML data obtained through the easychair conference management system13, (ii) html based input (iii) csv les (iv) ics les for calendar events.
Data conversion is implemented via XSLT transformations 14 and integrated
with existing LOD (e.g. we check if some of the conference participants are
already present in the SWDF corpus). Each person in the graph is identi ed
by a URI. For each person we generate a transparent URI of the form http://
data.semanticweb.org/person/<firstname>-<surname>. The convention to
generate a URIs for a person is to use http://data.semanticweb.org/person/
as pre x and concatenate any rstname, middle names and surnames, separeted
by the dash character. This procedure should make sure that if a person is already
present in the SWDF corpus, the same URI is reused. This can in practice cause
problems due to misspelling, noise and ambiguity, for which we implemented a
naive disambiguation procedure, described in [
Produced data is used to pre-populate on-line forms15, which are submitted to conference participants in order to (ii) verify correctness and (ii) collect additional information such as their photos and twitter accounts.
Resulting LOD data about the conference is sent as dump le to be integrated in the SWDF corpus. Currently this step is performed manually by the SWDF corpus administrator. 10 http://sempublishing.sourceforge.net/ 11 ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/eswc/ontology.owl 12 The ontology is available at ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/eswc/ontology.owl 13 http://www.easychair.org/ 14 http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt 15 Example of form: http://wit.istc.cnr.it/conference-live/data
This paper describes cLODg, a set of tools to collect, re ne and produce Linked Data to describe scienti c conferences and their publications, participants and events. cLODg is an answer to the need of open tools for metadata generation (in the spedi c case in the domain of scienti c conferences). It has the ambition to foster a synergy between publishers and researches and to provide a possible way forward to combine the e orts between the two. The main contribution of this work is an open source tool to support the production of metadata for conferences and scholarly data.