Springer Nature is the main publisher of scienti c conferences in Computer Science and produces several well-known series of proceedings books, such as LNCS. The editorial team needs to take critical decisions about which conferences to publish as well as actively scan the horizon for identifying emerging ones. In this short paper, we present the Conference Dashboard, a new web application based on a large knowledge graph of scholarly data (1.3B triples) for assessing scienti c conferences and informing editorial decisions.
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
In this short paper, we present the Conference Dashboard, a web
application which combines semantic technologies and visual analytics for assisting
editors in assessing conferences and informing editorial and marketing decisions.
This application was developed in the context of the collaboration between
Springer Nature and The Open University, which, since 2015, has produced an
array of applications based on semantic technologies, leading to several
improvement to the editorial pipeline and signi cant cost reductions [
The Conference Dashboard introduces three main novel features that are not supported by current tools, but are important for addressing our user cases. First, it o ers an interactive interface to compare and rank conferences within speci c elds and time-frames. Second, it allows users to analyze the research areas of a conference across time, in order to assess how the focus of the conference is shifting. Finally, it o ers several analytics for assessing the involvement of commercial organizations. For instance, it allows to visualize the ratio of articles from academia-industry collaborations or from speci c industrial sectors (e.g., automotive, nancial, energy). A demo version of the dashboard (covering the 2000-2020 period) is available at http://w3id.org/aida/dashboard/. The AIDA knowledge graph is stored using Virtuoso and can be queried via SPARQL Endpoint at http://w3id.org/aida. 2 Business Value Our experiments showed that the Conference Dashboard has an excellent usability (87.5/100 according to the SUS questionnaire) and halves the time needed for analysing a conference. It also allows less experienced members of the team to undertake this task, saving the time of senior members. This solution can thus signi cantly improve the e ciency of the process and reduce the editorial costs.
We are now working on extending our analytical solutions to journals and countries, to support further queries from other SN departments. We are also producing an open version of the dashboard that will be made publicly available.