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Case Study: ENVRI Science Demonstrators with D4Science
Whenever a community of practice starts developing an IT solution for its use case(s) it has to face the issue of carefully selecting “the platform” to use. Such a platform should match the requirements and the overall settings resulting from the specific application context (including legacy technologies and solutions to be integrated and reused, costs of adoption and operation, easiness in acquiring skills and competencies). There is no one-size-fits-all solution that is suitable for all application context, and this is particularly true for scientific communities and their cases because of the wide heterogeneity characterising them. However, there is a large consensus that solutions from scratch are inefficient and services that facilitate the development and maintenance of scientific community-specific solutions do exist. This chapter describes how a set of diverse communities of practice efficiently developed their science demonstrators (on analysing and producing user-defined atmosphere data products, greenhouse gases fluxes, particle formation, mosquito diseases) by leveraging the services offered by the D4Science infrastructure. It shows that the D4Science design decisions aiming at streamlining implementations are effective. The chapter discusses the added value injected in the science demonstrators and resulting from the reuse of D4Science services, especially regarding Open Science practices and overall quality of service.
Toward Representing Research Contributions in Scholarly Knowledge Graphs Using Knowledge Graph Cells
There is currently a gap between the natural language expression of scholarly publications and their structured semantic content modeling to enable intelligent content search. With the volume of research growing exponentially every year, a search feature operating over semantically structured content is compelling. Toward this end, in this work, we propose a novel semantic data model for modeling the contribution of scientific investigations. Our model, i.e. the Research Contribution Model (RCM), includes a schema of pertinent concepts highlighting six core information units, viz. Objective, Method, Activity, Agent, Material, and Result, on which the contribution hinges. It comprises bottom-up design considerations made from three scientific domains, viz. Medicine, Computer Science, and Agriculture, which we highlight as case studies. For its implementation in a knowledge graph application we introduce the idea of building blocks called Knowledge Graph Cells (KGC), which provide the following characteristics: (1) they limit the expressibility of ontologies to what is relevant in a knowledge graph regarding specific concepts on the theme of research contributions; (2) they are expressible via ABox and TBox expressions; (3) they enforce a certain level of data consistency by ensuring that a uniform modeling scheme is followed through rules and input controls; (4) they organize the knowledge graph into named graphs; (5) they provide information for the front end for displaying the knowledge graph in a human-readable form such as HTML pages; and (6) they can be seamlessly integrated into any existing publishing process thatsupports form-based input abstracting its semantic technicalities including RDF semantification from the user. Thus RCM joins the trend of existing work toward enhanced digitalization of scholarly publication enabled by an RDF semantification as a knowledge graph fostering the evolution of the scholarly publications beyond written text.
Crowdsourcing Scholarly Discourse Annotations
The number of scholarly publications grows steadily every year and it becomes harder to find, assess and compare scholarly knowledge effectively. Scholarly knowledge graphs have the potential to address these challenges. However, creating such graphs remains a complex task. We propose a method to crowdsource structured scholarly knowledge from paper authors with a web-based user interface supported by artificial intelligence. The interface enables authors to select key sentences for annotation. It integrates multiple machine learning algorithms to assist authors during the annotation, including class recommendation and key sentence highlighting. We envision that the interface is integrated in paper submission processes for which we define three main task requirements: The task has to be . We evaluated the interface with a user study in which participants were assigned the task to annotate one of their own articles. With the resulting data, we determined whether the participants were successfully able to perform the task. Furthermore, we evaluated the interface’s usability and the participant’s attitude towards the interface with a survey. The results suggest that sentence annotation is a feasible task for researchers and that they do not object to annotate their articles during the submission process.
Creating a Scholarly Knowledge Graph from Survey Article Tables
Due to the lack of structure, scholarly knowledge remains hardly accessible for machines. Scholarly knowledge graphs have been proposed as a solution. Creating such a knowledge graph requires manual effort and domain experts, and is therefore time-consuming and cumbersome. In this work, we present a human-in-the-loop methodology used to build a scholarly knowledge graph leveraging literature survey articles. Survey articles often contain manually curated and high-quality tabular information that summarizes findings published in the scientific literature. Consequently, survey articles are an excellent resource for generating a scholarly knowledge graph. The presented methodology consists of five steps, in which tables and references are extracted from PDF articles, tables are formatted and finally ingested into the knowledge graph. To evaluate the methodology, 92 survey articles, containing 160 survey tables, have been imported in the graph. In total, 2626 papers have been added to the knowledge graph using the presented methodology. The results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, but also indicate that manual effort is required and thus underscore the important role of human experts.
TinyGenius: Intertwining natural language processing with microtask crowdsourcing for scholarly knowledge graph creation
As the number of published scholarly articles grows steadily each year, new methods are needed to organize scholarly knowledge so that it can be more efficiently discovered and used. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are able to autonomously process scholarly articles at scale and to create machine readable representations of the article content. However, autonomous NLP methods are by far not sufficiently accurate to create a high-quality knowledge graph. Yet quality is crucial for the graph to be useful in practice. We present TinyGenius, a methodology to validate NLP-extracted scholarly knowledge statements using microtasks performed with crowdsourcing. The scholarly context in which the crowd workers operate has multiple challenges. The explainability of the employed NLP methods is crucial to provide context in order to support the decision process of crowd workers. We employed TinyGenius to populate a paper-centric knowledge graph, using five distinct NLP methods. In the end, the resulting knowledge graph serves as a digital library for scholarly articles.
Semantic and Knowledge Engineering Using ENVRI RM
The ENVRI Reference Model provides architects and engineers with the means to describe the architecture and operational behaviour of environmental and Earth science research infrastructures (RIs) in a standardised way using the standard terminology. This terminology and the relationships between specific classes of concept can be used as the basis for the machine-actionable specification of RIs or RI subsystems. Open Information Linking for Environmental RIs (OIL-E) is a framework for capturing architectural and design knowledge about environmental and Earth science RIs intended to help harmonise vocabulary, promote collaboration and identify common standards and technologies across different research infrastructure initiatives. At its heart is an ontology derived from the ENVRI Reference Model. Using this ontology, RI descriptions can be published as linked data, allowing discovery, querying and comparison using established Semantic Web technologies. It can also be used as an upper ontology by which to connect descriptions of RI entities (whether they be datasets, equipment, processes, etc.) that use other, more specific terminologies. The ENVRI Knowledge Base uses OIL-E to capture information about environmental and Earth science RIs in the ENVRI community for query and comparison. The Knowledge Base can be used to identify the technologies and standards used for particular activities and services and as a basis for evaluating research infrastructure subsystems and behaviours against certain criteria, such as compliance with the FAIR data principles.
Generate FAIR Literature Surveys with Scholarly Knowledge Graphs
Reviewing scientific literature is a cumbersome, time consuming but crucial activity in research. Leveraging a scholarly knowledge graph, we present a methodology and a system for comparing scholarly literature, in particular research contributions describing the addressed problem, utilized materials, employed methods and yielded results. The system can be used by researchers to quickly get familiar with existing work in a specific research domain (e.g., a concrete research question or hypothesis). Additionally, it can be used to publish literature surveys following the FAIR Data Principles. The methodology to create a research contribution comparison consists of multiple tasks, specifically: (a) finding similar contributions, (b) aligning contribution descriptions, (c) visualizing and finally (d) publishing the comparison. The methodology is implemented within the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), a scholarly infrastructure that enables researchers to collaboratively describe, find and compare research contributions. We evaluate the implementation using data extracted from published review articles. The evaluation also addresses the FAIRness of comparisons published with the ORKG.
Question Answering on Scholarly Knowledge Graphs
Answering questions on scholarly knowledge comprising text and other artifacts is a vital part of any research life cycle. Querying scholarly knowledge and retrieving suitable answers is currently hardly possible due to the following primary reason: machine inactionable, ambiguous and unstructured content in publications. We present JarvisQA, a BERT based system to answer questions on tabular views of scholarly knowledge graphs. Such tables can be found in a variety of shapes in the scholarly literature (e.g., surveys, comparisons or results). Our system can retrieve direct answers to a variety of different questions asked on tabular data in articles. Furthermore, we present a preliminary dataset of related tables and a corresponding set of natural language questions. This dataset is used as a benchmark for our system and can be reused by others. Additionally, JarvisQA is evaluated on two datasets against other baselines and shows an improvement of two to three folds in performance compared to related methods.
Towards Operational Research Infrastructures with FAIR Data and Services
Environmental research infrastructures aim to provide scientists with facilities, resources and services to enable scientists to effectively perform advanced research. When addressing societal challenges such as climate change and pollution, scientists usually need data, models and methods from different domains to tackle the complexity of the complete environmental system. Research infrastructures are thus required to enable all data, including services, products, and virtual research environments is FAIR for research communities: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. In this last chapter, we conclude and identify future challenges in research infrastructure operation, user support, interoperability, and future evolution.
Towards Customizable Chart Visualizations of Tabular Data Using Knowledge Graphs
Scientific articles are typically published as PDF documents, thus rendering the extraction and analysis of results a cumbersome, error-prone, and often manual effort. New initiatives, such as ORKG, focus on transforming the content and results of scientific articles into structured, machine-readable representations using Semantic Web technologies. In this article, we focus on tabular data of scientific articles, which provide an organized and compressed representation of information. However, chart visualizations can additionally facilitate their comprehension. We present an approach that employs a human-in-the-loop paradigm during the data acquisition phase to define additional semantics for tabular data. The additional semantics guide the creation of chart visualizations for meaningful representations of tabular data. Our approach organizes tabular data into different information groups which are analyzed for the selection of suitable visualizations. The set of suitable visualizations serves as a user-driven selection of visual representations. Additionally, customization for visual representations provides the means for facilitating the understanding and sense-making of information.