Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring, and analysing the research landscape. Some fields of research are comprehensively described by large-scale taxonomies, e.g., MeSH in Biology and PhySH in Physics. Conversely, current Computer Science taxonomies are coarse-grained and tend to evolve slowly. For instance, the ACM classification scheme contains only about 2K research topics and the last version dates back to 2012. In this paper, we introduce the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 14K topics and 162K semantic relationships. It was created by applying the Klink-2 algorithm on a very large dataset of 16M scientific articles. CSO presents two main advantages over the alternatives: i) it includes a very large number of topics that do not appear in other classifications, and ii) it can be updated automatically by running Klink-2 on recent corpora of publications. CSO powers several tools adopted by the editorial team at Springer Nature and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. To facilitate the uptake of CSO, we have also released the CSO Classifier, a tool for automatically classifying research papers, and the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO. Users can use the portal to navigate and visualise sections of the ontology, rate topics and relationships, and suggest missing ones. The portal will support the publication of and access to regular new releases of CSO, with the aim of providing a comprehensive resource to the various research communities engaged with scholarly data.
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Smart Topics Miner 2: Improving Proceedings Retrievability at Springer Nature
Producing a robust and comprehensive representation of the research topics covered by a scientific publication is a crucial task that has a major impact on its retrievability and consequently on the diffusion of the relevant scientific ideas. Springer Nature, the world’s largest academic book publisher, has typically entrusted this task to the most expert editors, which had to manually analyse new books and produce a list of the most relevant topics. To support Springer Nature in this task, we developed Smart Topic Miner, an application that assists the editorial team in annotating proceedings books according to a large-scale ontology of research areas. Over the past three years, we evolved this application according to the editors’ feedback and developed a new engine, a new interface, and several other functionalities. In this demo paper, we present Smart Topic Miner 2, the most recent version of the tool, which is being regularly utilized by editors in Germany, China, Brazil, and Japan to annotate all book series covering conference proceedings in Computer Science, for a total of about 800 volumes per year.
Integrating Knowledge Graphs for Comparing the Scientific Output of Academia and Industry
Analysing the relationship between academia and industry allows us to understand how the knowledge produced by the universities is being adopted and enriched by the industrial sector, and ultimately affects society through the release of relevant products and services. In this paper, we present a preliminary approach to assess and compare the research outputs of academia and industry. This solution integrates data from several knowledge graphs describing scientific articles (Microsoft Academics Graph), research topics (Computer Science Ontology), organizations (Global Research Identifier Database), and types of industry (DBpedia). We focus on the Semantic Web as exemplary field and report several insights regarding the different behaviours of academia and industry, and the types of industries most active in this field.
Improving Editorial Workflow and Metadata Quality at Springer Nature
Identifying the research topics that best describe the scope of a scientific publication is a crucial task for editors, in particular because the quality of these annotations determine how effectively users are able to discover the right content in online libraries. For this reason, Springer Nature, the world’s largest academic book publisher, has traditionally entrusted this task to their most expert editors. These editors manually analyse all new books, possibly including hundreds of chapters, and produce a list of the most relevant topics. Hence, this process has traditionally been very expensive, time-consuming, and confined to a few senior editors. For these reasons, back in 2016 we developed Smart Topic Miner (STM), an ontology-driven application that assists the Springer Nature editorial team in annotating the volumes of all books covering conference proceedings in Computer Science. Since then STM has been regularly used by editors in Germany, China, Brazil, India, and Japan, for a total of about 800 volumes per year. Over the past three years the initial prototype has iteratively evolved in response to feedback from the users and evolving requirements.
The CSO Classifier: Ontology-Driven Detection of Research Topics in Scholarly Articles
Classifying research papers according to their research topics is an important task to improve their retrievability, assist the creation of smart analytics, and support a variety of approaches for analysing and making sense of the research environment. In this paper, we present the CSO Classifier, a new unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a comprehensive ontology of research areas in the field of Computer Science. The CSO Classifier takes as input the metadata associated with a research paper (title, abstract, keywords) and returns a selection of research concepts drawn from the ontology. The approach was evaluated on a gold standard of manually annotated articles yielding a significant improvement over alternative methods.
Interview about my PHD Viva
A fellow researcher (Tina Papathoma) asked me to record a video in which I discuss my experience with the writing and defending my PhD thesis. She presented it to the “How to finish your PhD thesis and successfully defend it” workshop at the 15th EATEL Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning (JTELSS 2019) which took place on […]
Defended my Thesis
On 31st May 2019, I defended my thesis on the “Early Detection of Research Trends”.
The exam panel consisted of Dr Pallavi Anand from the Open University as chair, and two external examiners Prof Kalina Bontcheva from the University of Sheffield, and Prof Alun Preece from Cardiff University.
New release: CSO Classifier v2.1
We are pleased to announce that we recently created a new release of the CSO Classifier (v2.1), an application for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology (CSO). Recently, we have been intensively working on improving its scalability, removing all its bottlenecks and making sure it could be run on large corpus. […]
CSO Classifier
Classifying research papers according to their research topics is an important task to improve their retrievability, assist the creation of smart analytics, and support a variety of approaches for analysing and making sense of the research environment. In this page, we present the CSO Classifier, a new unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a comprehensive ontology of research areas in the field of Computer Science.
The World Wide Web turns 30
I have always been passionate about technology. When I bought my first computer (special thanks to my father for funding it), and got it connected to the internet, it soon became part of my life: downloading movies, music, studying, chatting, engaging with different communities, writing a blog, buying and selling stuff. The web gave me […]
