2018, Auer, Sören, Blümel, Ina, Ewerth, Ralph, Garatzogianni, Alexandra, Heller,, Lambert, Hoppe, Anett, Kasprzik, Anna, Koepler, Oliver, Nejdl, Wolfgang, Plank, Margret, Sens, Irina, Stocker, Markus, Tullney, Marco, Vidal, Maria-Esther, van Wezenbeek, Wilma

The document-oriented workflows in science have reached (or already exceeded) the limits of adequacy as highlighted for example by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature and the reproducibility crisis. Despite an improved and digital access to scientific publications in the last decades, the exchange of scholarly knowledge continues to be primarily document-based: Researchers produce essays and articles that are made available in online and offline publication media as roughly granular text documents. With current developments in areas such as knowledge representation, semantic search, human-machine interaction, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, it is possible to completely rethink this dominant paradigm of document-centered knowledge exchange and transform it into knowledge-based information flows by representing and expressing knowledge through semantically rich, interlinked knowledge graphs. The core of the establishment of knowledge-based information flows is the distributed, decentralized, collaborative creation and evolution of information models, vocabularies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs for the establishment of a common understanding of data and information between the various stakeholders as well as the integration of these technologies into the infrastructure and processes of search and knowledge exchange in the research library of the future. By integrating these information models into existing and new research infrastructure services, the information structures that are currently still implicit and deeply hidden in documents can be made explicit and directly usable. This revolutionizes scientific work because information and research results can be seamlessly interlinked with each other and better mapped to complex information needs. As a result, scientific work becomes more effective and efficient, since results become directly comparable and easier to reuse. In order to realize the vision of knowledge-based information flows in scholarly communication, comprehensive long-term technological infrastructure development and accompanying research are required. To secure information sovereignty, it is also of paramount importance to science – and urgency to science policymakers – that scientific infrastructures establish an open counterweight to emerging commercial developments in this area. The aim of this position paper is to facilitate the discussion on requirements, design decisions and a minimum viable product for an Open Research Knowledge Graph infrastructure. TIB aims to start developing this infrastructure in an open collaboration with interested partner organizations and individuals.

2020, D'Souza, Jennifer, Hoppe, Anett, Brack, Arthur, Jaradeh, Mohamad Yaser, Auer, Sören, Ewerth, Ralph

We introduce the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) Dataset for Scientific Entity Extraction, Classification, and Resolution, version 1.0 (STEM-ECR v1.0). The STEM-ECR v1.0 dataset has been developed to provide a benchmark for the evaluation of scientific entity extraction, classification, and resolution tasks in a domain-independent fashion. It comprises abstracts in 10 STEM disciplines that were found to be the most prolific ones on a major publishing platform. We describe the creation of such a multidisciplinary corpus and highlight the obtained findings in terms of the following features: 1) a generic conceptual formalism for scientific entities in a multidisciplinary scientific context; 2) the feasibility of the domain-independent human annotation of scientific entities under such a generic formalism; 3) a performance benchmark obtainable for automatic extraction of multidisciplinary scientific entities using BERT-based neural models; 4) a delineated 3-step entity resolution procedure for human annotation of the scientific entities via encyclopedic entity linking and lexicographic word sense disambiguation; and 5) human evaluations of Babelfy returned encyclopedic links and lexicographic senses for our entities. Our findings cumulatively indicate that human annotation and automatic learning of multidisciplinary scientific concepts as well as their semantic disambiguation in a wide-ranging setting as STEM is reasonable.

2021, Brack, Arthur, Hoppe, Anett, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören, Ewerth, Ralph

Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KG) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective and present a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting and reviewing daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications, and outline possible solutions.

2020, Brack, Arthur, Hoppe, Anett, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören, Ewerth, Ralph, Hall, Mark, Merčun, Tanja, Risse, Thomas, Duchateau, Fabien

Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KGs) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective by presenting a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications and outline possible solutions.

2020, Brack, Arthur, D'Souza, Jennifer, Hoppe, Anett, Auer, Sören, Ewerth, Ralph, Jose, Joemon M., Yilmaz, Emine, Magalhães, João, Castells, Pablo, Ferro, Nicola, Silva, Mário J., Martins, Flávio

We examine the novel task of domain-independent scientific concept extraction from abstracts of scholarly articles and present two contributions. First, we suggest a set of generic scientific concepts that have been identified in a systematic annotation process. This set of concepts is utilised to annotate a corpus of scientific abstracts from 10 domains of Science, Technology and Medicine at the phrasal level in a joint effort with domain experts. The resulting dataset is used in a set of benchmark experiments to (a) provide baseline performance for this task, (b) examine the transferability of concepts between domains. Second, we present a state-of-the-art deep learning baseline. Further, we propose the active learning strategy for an optimal selection of instances from among the various domains in our data. The experimental results show that (1) a substantial agreement is achievable by non-experts after consultation with domain experts, (2) the baseline system achieves a fairly high F1 score, (3) active learning enables us to nearly halve the amount of required training data.