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What it is

Scholexplorer is a service that accepts publications-data or data-data links from validated sources, builds a de-duplicated graph and provides access to it. ScholExplorer is an implementation of the Scholix initiative (an RDA and WDS).

What it does

Scholexplorer populates and provides access to a graph of links between dataset and literature objects and dataset and dataset objects. Links (and objects) are provided by data sources managed by publishers, data centers, or other organizations providing services to store and manage links between data sets and publications such as CrossRef, DataCite, and OpenAIRE. Scholexplorer aggregates link metadata harvested from the data sources and out of these builds and harmonised and de-duplicated graph of scholarly objects. The graph is openly accessible (CC-0) via search REST APIs that return links in Scholix format.

How can I use it?

ScholeXplorer is reached via REST APIs as these are defined in the Scholix initiative. They are free-to-use (no sign-up needed) by any third-party service. Note that:

Technical requirements

The Scholix Swagger API allows clients to run REST queries over the Scholexplorer index in order to fetch links matching given criteria. In the current version, clients can search for:

  • links whose source object has a given PID or PID type;
  • links whose source object has been published by a given data source;
  • links that were collected from a given data source.

The APIs are available from here. The results of queries return lists of links encoded as JSON Scholix records. JSON (and XML) schema and example records for Scholix links are availabe on GitHub.

Operation/Policies

The service is running in production 24/7 within the OpenAIRE infrastructure premises deployed at the data center facilities of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM). Scholix metadata records retuned by the service can be freely re-used by commercial and non-commercial partners under CC-BY license, hence as long as OpenAIRE ScholeXplorer is acknowledged as content provider.