LD Connect Beta Version 2 Now Available from IOS Press

Amsterdam/Santa Barbara – IOS Press is pleased to announce the availability of LD Connect 2.0 (Beta). This linked data portal with an improved user interface currently contains linked IOS Press (meta)data from more than 132,000 journal articles and book chapters and over 330,000 authors resulting in more than 16 million triples.

“As a science publishing house operating in an era of accelerating digital transformation, we feel it is imperative for us to enable hassle-free access to our data,” explained Dr. Einar Fredriksson, Founder and Director of IOS Press. “As we explore the potential of structured open linked data sources, we are offering our datasets in human- and machine-readable form via the Web with the goal of making a meaningful contribution to sharing research outputs and incentivizing discovery.”

LD Connect now provides enhanced metadata to researchers, publishers and publishing analytics services, database developers, and other entities that enable the following:

Discoverability: Automatic discovery of datasets that improves internal workflows, e.g., structured data storage and automated content updates. Plus search functionality with robust linkages that enhances discoverability of research output. Contextual relations between authors, institutions and research areas can be made visible.

Accessibility: Public availability of easily downloadable human- and machine-readable IOS Press metadata ready for further analysis.

Interoperability: Data integrated with other data and interoperable with applications or workflows for analysis, storage and processing, for example scientometric applications to visualize, interpret and discover new relationships.

Data Reusability: Data reusability is facilitated by a custom vocabulary and rigid adherence to open Web standards while describing our data. This enables enrichment of third-party datasets and unsiloing datasets. Downstream applications such as abstracting and indexing databases can use this data portal to ensure their own datastores are always up to date with the latest research published by IOS Press.

Furthermore, authors who publish their work with IOS Press can do so under the assurance that their work is disseminated through both human and machine accessible channels.

The 16 million triples (linked subjects, predicates and objects extracted from statements in the knowledge graph) in the IOS Press Knowledge Graph (KG) within LD Connect are comprised of individual statements and maps connections across metadata from journal articles, book chapters, authors, affiliations, keywords and other bibliographic metadata to provide a complete ecosystem of IOS Press scholarly relationships. LD Connect also offers extensive document and KG embeddings, which are constructed from the metadata as well as the full texts from all IOS Press content.

New data are continuously added to LD Connect. Tools for data querying and knowledge mining are already available, including a visual linked data browser, SPARQL query endpoint and visual query interface. To further enrich the portal, a suite of enhanced semantic search tools to query and visualize the data is currently in proof of concept (PoC) stage. More information about these PoCs is available at the Tools tab at http://ld.iospress.nl/forthcoming.

“We spent a considerable amount of time cleaning up our data and constructing a conversion pipeline to transform all IOS Press article and book metadata to Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based linked data,” commented Stephanie Delbecque, LD Connect Product Manager. “We use a custom vocabulary, word embeddings and web standards consistently while describing our data, in order to make our data even more discoverable, accessible, linkable and interoperable with other datasets. With the help of machine learning techniques, the data conversion pipeline keeps on improving the more data are added.”

The complete dataset, its subsets and additional technical details can be explored and downloaded at http://ld.iospress.nl. LD Connect seeks collaboration with other datasets and parties. We welcome any feedback and suggestions. LD Connect is developed in collaboration with STKO Lab in Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

Media Contact:
Stephanie Delbecque
s.delbecque@iospress.nl

# # #

About IOS Press
IOS Press is headquartered in Amsterdam with satellite offices in the USA, Germany, India and China and serves the information needs of scientific and medical communities worldwide. IOS Press now publishes more than 80 international peer-reviewed journals and about 75 book titles each year on subjects ranging from computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering to medicine, neuroscience, and cancer research. www.iospress.com

About STKO Lab
The STKO Lab of the University of Santa Barbara is an information observatory that investigates the role of Space and Time for Knowledge Organization. Research at the Lab spans across different scientific disciplines such as geoinformatics, cognitive science, computer science, and the broader earth sciences. Typically, work topics are related to geospatial semantics, ontologies, the Semantic Web, (location-based) social networks, and geographic information retrieval. http://stko.geog.ucsb.edu