The Quest for Research Information

Abstract

Research information, i.e., data about research projects, organisations, researchers or research outputs such as publications or patents, is spread across the web, usually residing on institutional and personal web pages or in semi-open databases and information systems. While there exists a wealth of unstructured information, the limited amounts of structured data often are exposed following proprietary or less-established schemas and interfaces. Therefore, a holistic view on research information across organisational and national boundaries is not feasible and information is inconsistent and incomplete. On the other hand, web crawling and information extraction techniques have matured throughout the last decade, allowing for automated approaches of harvesting, extracting and consolidating research information into a more coherent knowledge graph. In particular the Linked Data community has provided a range of techniques, schemas and vocabularies which allow to represent and interlink research information in a more coherent manner. In this work, we give an overview of the current state of the art in research information sharing on the web and present initial ideas towards a more holistic approach for boot-strapping research information from available web sources.