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Jan 29, 2024
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Recap: The 1st OpenAIRE Graph Community Call

Jan 29, 2024

The very first OpenAIRE Graph Community Call took place on 17 January 2024, where we welcomed over 80 participants in an open discussion surrounding the knowledge graph. This special session, hosted by OpenAIRE CTO Paolo Manghi, covered the origins of the Graph and the role it plays in the Open Science landscape.

The OpenAIRE Graph Community Call Series: This inaugural call kicked off the new OpenAIRE Graph Community Call series which will cover three themes exploring the Graph Workflow, New Updates & Developments, and Use Cases & API. Held on the third Wednesday of every month, these calls serve as an opportunity to contribute to the OpenAIRE Graph development and to learn how to best harness it for your projects.

The Inaugural Community Call
The first call was specially hosted by OpenAIRE CTO Paolo Manghi. He opened the session by emphasising the importance of the Graph as an open and transparent resource, of which we strongly rely on the community for feedback to help us better it for your needs. This belief in the power of community engagement is one of the driving forces behind the launch of this new series, opening a dialogue to discuss ways we can improve our service


The OpenAIRE Graph: An Overview
Starting off, we dove into the need for a global open scholarly knowledge graph. What was missing from the landscape was an open data collection that extends beyond publications. This collection could be used to transparently build services to facilitate and foster discovery and monitoring.

We track science in an open way, we interconnect it, we further clean it and then we offer this data for the purpose of discovery and monitoring mechanisms, which are critical for science in terms of development, planning, and evaluation.” - Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE CTO

To construct such a graph, the team pulls together data from research products, persons (such as information regarding authorship), organisations, projects, sources, and funders. The data model has several special features that set it apart such as persistent identifiers, embedded indicators, and stable identifiers.

Thanks to this model, after the collection of over 500Mi records, the Graph is able to report the following numbers:

Graph Comm Call 3

To obtain these records, the Graph collects information from 2,200 data sources around the world and puts them through a complex aggregation-enrichment-deduplication pipeline. This results in the OpenAIRE Graph as we know it, open, transparent, and connected. The call continued on exploring the Graph novelties, practical applications, and future developments and concluded with questions and answers. You can watch a full recording of the Community Call on our YouTube channel and access the presentation slides on Zenodo.

Get Involved
Being an open and transparent good, we call upon the community to contribute to the Graph to further expand and enrich it for the whole of the scientific community. There are many ways to contribute,

    • The first being engaging in our monthly Community Calls! These open discussions are the opportunity to share feedback, voice concerns, pose questions, and give suggestions on the features you would like to see in the Graph.
    • We also encourage the community to share any and all feedback as well as questions in our new User Forum dedicated to the OpenAIRE Graph. Here, you can reach out to the Graph team directly and also receive support and tips from other community members.
    • Finally, you can directly contribute to the OpenAIRE Graph by uploading your research outputs to Zenodo or other registered repositories in OpenAIRE Provide.
“The OpenAIRE Graph is a public good operated by OpenAIRE AMKE, a non-profit based on membership from the community. Anybody that’s a member of the organisation can contribute to and steer the Graph roadmap. It is an entity that goes beyond the people and that goes beyond the individual organisation; it is a community effort.” - Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE CTO

By engaging with the Graph community and publishing Open Access, you play a pivotal role in fortifying and expanding the Open Science landscape, as your engagement contributes the knowledge and resources necessary for the advancement of research.

We would like to thank once again everyone who participated in the very first Graph Community Call. The Graph, along with all OpenAIRE services, is co-shaped by the research community, we value your feedback as we are constantly working to develop new features to meet your needs. We look forward to seeing you again!

If you want to catch up with the previous community call, follow the links for the recording, slides, and the collaborative notes. See you in February!

Our next Community Call will be held 21 February 11:00-12:00 CET. Hosted by Claudio Atzori, the Graph’s lead data engineer, the next session will dive into the first step of the production workflow, content’s acquisition. Open to all in the community, come with your questions, suggestions, or plain curiosity. You can register here.

Breaking news! The OpenAIRE Graph has also just launched a new Twitter page, follow @OpenAIREGraph to stay up to date on the latest developments and news.