=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1486/paper_85
|storemode=property
|title=cLODg - Conference Linked Open Data Generator
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1486/paper_85.pdf
|volume=Vol-1486
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/GentileN15
}}
==cLODg - Conference Linked Open Data Generator==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1486/paper_85.pdf
cLODg - Conference Linked Open Data
Generator
Anna Lisa Gentile1? and Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese2
1
Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK
2
Semantic Technology Lab, ISTC-CNR. Italy
a.gentile@sheffield.ac.uk, andrea.nuzzolese@istc.cnr.it
Abstract. In this paper we describe cLODg (conference Linked Open
Data generator), a set of tools to collect, refine and produce Linked Data
to describe a scientific 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 efforts in this
direction between researchers and publishers.
1 Introduction
A good practise in the semantic Web community is to encourage the publication
“eating our own dog food” [7]. The main example is the Semantic Web Dog Food 3
(SWDF), a corpus that collects linked data about papers, people, organizations,
and events related to academic conferences. Currently, all main semantic Web
conferences and related events publish their data as linked data on SWDF, but
for many other conferences, events and publication venues information is still
not available in a structured and linked form.
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, verification and
finally publication.
In this work we present cLODg (conference Linked Open Data generator),
a tool that provides a formalized process for the conference metadata publi-
cation workflow. cLODg is an Open Source solution currently under develop-
ment4 , which has been used to gather and publish metadata for ESWC20145
and ESWC20156 .
The main contributions of cLODg is a formalized, open source workflow which
provides: (i) Facilities to gather/convert conference data from different source
formats. (ii) The possibility to represent such data using different 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 col-
lection of additional information and the verification 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 different output formats, including efficient repre-
sentations 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 State of the art
The first considerable effort to offer comprehensive semantic descriptions of con-
ference events is represented by the metadata projects at ESWC 2006 and ISWC
2006 conferences [10], with the Semantic Web Conference Ontology [9] being the
vocabulary of choice to represent such data.
Increasing number of initiatives are pursuing the publication about confer-
ences 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 field known
as Semantic Publishing [11]. Semantic Publishing aims at providing access to
semantic enhanced scholarly products with the aim of enabling a variety of se-
mantically oriented tasks, such as knowledge discovery, knowledge exploration
and data integration. The Semantic Publishing challenge [8] is a breakthrough in
this direction. Its objective is assessing the quality of systems that extract mean-
ingful metadata from scholarly articles and represent them as RDF. Similarly
to the Semantic Publishing challenge, the Jailbreaking the PDF initiative [5] is
aimed at creating a formal flexible infrastructure to extract semantic informa-
tion from PDF documents by combining existing solutions and tools in order to
extract data from raw PDFs and convert data to domain-specific annotations.
Despite these continuous efforts, it has been argued that lots of informa-
tion 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 [4].
3 The cLODg tool - publishing Conference Semantic
Data
Conference metadata collected from different 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 [9] and one which en-
riches the representations with the SPAR ontologies10 and novel ad-hoc ontol-
ogy patterns to also capture social data11 . Nevertheless, cLODg architecture
allows the addition of other representations in the future. The Semantic Web
Conference ontology [9] is one of the vocabulary of choice to describe academic
conferences. The SWC ontology extends and combines existing widely accepted
vocabularies (i.e., FOAF [3], SIOC [2], Dublin Core [1]) to provide a reference
model to describe typical actors in an academic conference, such as accepted
papers, authors, their affiliations, organizing committee and all other roles in-
volved. Choosing the SWC ontology as reference vocabulary makes sure that
data is homogeneous with the SWDF corpus. The additional concepts, proper-
ties and axioms that we introduce are further described in [6] and the resulting
ontology is available on-line12 .
The cLODg workflow consists of four main steps:
1. Data acquisition
2. Data conversion and integration
3. Data augmentation and verification
4. Linked Data Publication
Data acquisition is currently supported from (i) proprietary XML data ob-
tained through the easychair conference management system13 , (ii) html based
input (iii) csv files (iv) ics files 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 identified
by a URI. For each person we generate a transparent URI of the form http://
data.semanticweb.org/person/-. The convention to
generate a URIs for a person is to use http://data.semanticweb.org/person/
as prefix and concatenate any firstname, 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 [6].
Produced data is used to pre-populate on-line forms15 , which are submit-
ted 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 file 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
4 Conclusions and future work
This paper describes cLODg, a set of tools to collect, refine and produce Linked
Data to describe scientific conferences and their publications, participants and
events. cLODg is an answer to the need of open tools for metadata generation
(in the spedific case in the domain of scientific conferences). It has the ambition
to foster a synergy between publishers and researches and to provide a possible
way forward to combine the efforts 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.
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