The SKM³ team at the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute and Springer Nature have signed a new agreement, extending their collaboration in the area of scholarly analytics until January 2021. The collaboration between the SKM³ team and Springer Nature started in 2014 and has continued without interruptions for the past 5 years.

This partnership focuses on developing intelligent solutions that capitalise on the research work of the SKM³ team to improve both the quality and the efficiency of the editorial process at Springer Nature and to allow editors to make informed, evidence-based decisions about their marketing strategy.

Since 2014, this partnership has developed a number of innovative technologies, including:

1. A portal allowing users to browse, download, and provide feedback about the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), the world’s largest taxonomy of research areas in Computer Science, which is automatically generated and regularly updated using the Klink-2 algorithm over a very large corpus of papers in Computer Science. CSO, which has been formally adopted by Springer Nature, includes 14K topics and 163K relationships and provides the ontological basis for all solutions deployed by the SKM³ team.
2. The CSO Classifier, a new unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology (CSO). The CSO Classifier takes as input the metadata associated with a research paper (title, abstract, keywords) and returns a selection of research topics drawn from the ontology.
3. Smart Topic Miner, a tool which uses semantic web technologies to classify the conference proceedings in Computer Science published by Springer Nature, about 800 volumes a year, in terms of the research topics provided by the CSO ontology. A demo of the system is available at http://stm-demo.kmi.open.ac.uk.
4. Smart Book Recommender (SBR), which assists editors in deciding which editorial products to market at a specific conference venue. SBR takes as input data about a conference and suggests books, journals, and other conference proceedings which are likely to be relevant to the attendees of the conference in question. A SBR demo is available at http://rexplore.kmi.open.ac.uk/SBR-demo/.

Building on this extensive set of innovative technologies, we plan to further develop our collaboration in the next year by developing both new analytics tools for Computer Science editors, as well as new intelligence capabilities, to support the Marketing department in tailoring their product packages for different organizations.

We are very excited to renew our longstanding strategic partnership with Springer Nature and we are very much looking forward to producing a new generation of intelligent solutions to support their editorial and marketing teams.

Relevant papers

Overview of collaboration with Springer Nature

• Osborne, F., Salatino, A., Birukou, A., Thanapalasingam, T., and Motta, E. (2017) Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies. International Semantic Web Conference 2017, Industry Track. Vienna, Austria.

Computer Science Ontology

• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Birukou, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2019) The Computer Science Ontology: A Comprehensive Automatically-Generated Taxonomy of Research Areas, Data Intelligence, pp. (In Press)
• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas, The International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, California, USA

CSO Classifier

• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F., Thanapalasingam, T. and Motta, E. (2019) The CSO Classifier: Ontology-Driven Detection of Research Topics in Scholarly Articles, TPDL 2019: 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Oslo, Norway
• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) Classifying Research Papers with the Computer Science Ontology, Poster at International Semantic Web Conference, Posters & Demonstrations and Industry Tracks, MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, USA

Smart Topic Miner

• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2019) Improving Editorial Workflow and Metadata Quality at Springer Nature, The 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019), Auckland, New Zealand
• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2019) Smart Topics Miner 2: Improving Proceedings Retrievability at Springer Nature, 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019): Posters & Demonstrations, Industry and Outrageous Ideas Tracks, Auckland, New Zeeland
• Osborne, F., Salatino, A., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2016)Automatic Classification of Springer Nature Proceedings with Smart Topic Miner. International Semantic Web Conference 2016, Kobe, Japan. – slides

Smart Book Recommender

• Thanapalasingam, T., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2018) Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products, The International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, California, USA
• Thanapalasingam, T., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2018) The Smart Book Recommender: An Ontology-Driven Application for Recommending Editorial Products, Demo at International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, California, USA
• Osborne, F., Birukou, A., Thanapalasingam, T. , and Motta, E. (2017) Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products. International Semantic Web Conference 2017, Poster Track. Vienna, Austria.

Klink algorithm

• Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2015) Klink-2: Integrating Multiple Web Sources to Generate Semantic Topic Networks, International Semantic Web Conference 2015, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

Augur

• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2018, Fort Worth, Texas
• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E., 2017. How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas. PeerJ Computer Science, 3, p.e119.