Week from Aug 03 to Aug 09

Introduction

This is the first weekly report related to my proceedings in the OpenCitations post-degree research scholarship I’m currently involved in.
The research project, lead by professor Silvio Peroni from University of Bologna and funded by the Wellcome Trust, will take 5 months starting from August and ending on December 2020.
Each week, starting from now, I’m going to publish a detailed report keeping track of every progress made since the previous one.

Report

The first week was fully dedicated to the reading of many resources regarding the OpenCitations project and its outcomes. The goal was to achieve a better comprehension of the OC effort, what has already been done and what has not been done yet. This will be very useful in the next weeks when I’ll be working with pre-existing OC technologies, as knowing in advance what they were made for and how they’re supposed to work will surely provide me a smoother experience.

Articles

During the week I read many scholar papers suggested by prof. Peroni. In particular, I studied the following articles:

General knowledge about the project

• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2020). OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1): 428-444.
• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton, Fabio Vitali (2017). One year of the OpenCitations Corpus: Releasing RDF-based scholarly citation data into the Public Domain. In Proceedings of the 16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2017): 184-192., OpenAccess at https://w3id.org/people/essepuntato/papers/oc-iswc2017.html
• Marilena Daquino (2020). The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus: Progress Report

Data model

• Marilena Daquino, Silvio Peroni, David M. Shotton, Giovanni Colavizza, Behnam Ghavimi, Anne Lauscher, Philipp Mayr, Matteo Romanello, Philipp Zumstein (2020). The OpenCitations Data Model.
• Marilena Daquino, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2020). The OpenCitations Data Model. Figshare.

Currently adopted provenance-tracking technique

• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton, Fabio Vitali (2016). A document-inspired way for tracking changes of RDF data - The case of the OpenCitations Corpus. In Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Detection, Representation and Management of Concept Drift in Linked Open Data (Drift-a-LOD 2016): 26-33.

OpenCitations workflow (BEE, SPACIN, COCI, SPAR …)

• Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Scientometrics, 121 (2): 1213-1228.
• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2018). The SPAR Ontologies. In Proceedings of the 17th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2018): 119-136.
• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton, Fabio Vitali (2016). Freedom for bibliographic references: OpenCitations arise. In Proceedings of 2016 International Workshop on Linked Data for Information Extraction (LD4IE 2016): 32-43.
• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton, Fabio Vitali (2016). Building citation networks with SPACIN. In Proceedings of the Poster and Demo track of the 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2016).

Definitions

• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2018). Open Citation: Definition. Figshare.
• Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2019). Open Citation Identifier: Definition. Figshare.

Videos

I watched the following YouTube videos, which I found to be useful:

• John Chodacki (2020). Fireside Chat with John Chodacki. Today’s Guests David Shotton & Silvio Peroni
• Zeeba TV (2017). OpenCitations: structured open citation data as a part of the Commons
• Zeeba TV (2019). COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations - Ivan Heibi

Other resources

In addition to this, I also had an initial look at the source code provided in the CCC GitHub repository and I started studying Python libraries such as unittest (for unit-testing) and threading (for providing multithreading capabilities to the script).