Facts
Management
Prof. Dr. Sören Auer
Team
Markus Stocker, Yaser Jaradeh, Allard Oelen, Jennifer D‘Souza
Funding
European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant
Duration
1 May 2019 – 30 April 2024
Homepage
In ScienceGRAPH we aim to develop a novel principled model for representing, analysing, augmenting and exploiting scholarly communication in a knowledge-based way by expressing and linking scientific contributions and related artefacts through semantically rich, interlinked knowledge graphs.
Description
Prof. Dr. Sören Auer, Director of TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and Professor for Data Science and Digital Libraries at the L3S Research Center at Leibniz University Hannover has been awarded one of the world-renowned Consolidator Grants of the European Research Council (ERC) for his research work “ScienceGraph – Knowledge Graph based Representation, Augmentation and Exploration of Scholarly Communication”. The project will be located at the Leibniz Joint Lab "Data Science & Open Knowledge" of the TIB and the L3S Research Center and will receive the funding of two million euros over the next five years.
Objectives
Despite an improved digital access to scientific publications in the last decades, the fundamental principles of scholarly communication remain unchanged and continue to be largely document-based. The document- oriented workflows in science have reached the limits of adequacy as highlighted by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature, the deficiency of peer-review and the reproducibility crisis. In ScienceGRAPH we aim to develop a novel principled model for representing, analysing, augmenting and exploiting scholarly communication in a knowledge-based way by expressing and linking scientific contributions and related artefacts through semantically rich, interlinked knowledge graphs. The model is based on deep semantic representation of scientific contributions, their manual, crowd-sourced and automatic augmentation and finally the intuitive exploration and interaction employing question answering on the resulting ScienceGRAPH base. Currently, knowledge graphs are still confined to representing encyclopaedic, factual information. ScienceGRAPH advances the state-of-the-art by enabling to represent complex interdisciplinary scientific information including fine-grained provenance preservation, discourse capture, evolution tracing and concept drift. Also, we will demonstrate that we can synergistically combine automated extraction and augmentation techniques, with large-scale collaboration to reach an unprecedented level of knowledge graph breadth and depth. As a result, we expect a paradigm shift in the methods of academic discourse towards knowledge-based in- formation flows, which facilitate completely new ways of search and exploration. The efficiency and effectiveness of scholarly communication will significant increase, since ambiguities are reduced, reproducibility is facilitated, redundancy is avoided, provenance and contributions can be better traced and the interconnections of research contributions are made more explicit and transparent.
ERC Consolidator Grants
ERC Consolidator Grants are designed to support excellent researchers at the stage of consolidating their own research team or programme. The science prizes, financed by the European Union with a total of 573 million Euros, are intended to support top scientists in their visionary basic research. In 2018, 291 of the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grants were awarded across Europe. With 2,389 applications, this corresponds to a success rate of only twelve percent.
Cooperation
Partners:
- Leibniz Universität Hannover, Forschungszentrum L3S
- Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB)
- Institut für Angewandte Informatik (InfAI) e.V.
Project Lead: Leibniz Universität Hannover, Forschungszentrum L3S
