Aligning Web Collaboration Tools with Research Data for Scholars Laurens De Vocht 1 laurens.devocht@ugent.be Selver Softic 2 selver.softic@tugraz.at Erik Mannens 1 erik.mannens@ugent.be Martin Ebner 2 martin.ebner@tugraz.at Rik Van de Walle 1 rik.vandewalle@ugent.be 1 Ghent University - iMinds - Multimedia Lab 2 Graz University of Technology Ghent, Belgium Graz, Austria ABSTRACT Resources for research are not always easy to explore, and rarely come with strong support for identifying, linking and selecting those that can be of interest to scholars. In this work we introduce a model that uses state-of-the-art seman- tic technologies to interlink structured research data and data from Web collaboration tools, social media and Linked Open Data. We use this model to build a platform that connects scholars, using their profiles as a starting point to explore novel and relevant content for their research. Schol- ars can easily adapt to evolving trends by synchronizing new social media accounts or collaboration tools and integrate then with new datasets. We evaluate our approach by a scenario of personalized exploration of research repositories where we analyze real world scholar profiles and compare them to a reference profile. 1. INTRODUCTION Publication repositories and online journals all have search engines to help scholars find interesting resources. However, these approaches are often ine↵ective, mostly because schol- ars: (i) only look-up resources based, at best, on their topics or keywords, not taking into account the specific context and the scholar’s profile; (ii) are restricted to resources from a single origin. Of course, aggregators exist that index re- sources from multiple sources. The challenge is therefore in matching research needs and contexts to opportunities from multiple, heterogeneous sources. In other words, we should make the most of the wealth of resources for research through relating and matching their scholar profile with the online available resources, publications and other scholar’s profiles. Usually scholars need a paid membership to get full access to journals’ articles, the library ‘paywall’. At the same time a growing number of “Open Journals” o↵er free online access to all their published works. Most prominent archives in this area are Directory of Open Access Journals 1 as well as On- 1 http://www.doaj.org/ Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Com- mittee (IW3C2). IW3C2 reserves the right to provide a hyperlink to the author’s site if the Material is used in electronic media. WWW’14 Companion, April 7–11, 2014, Seoul, Korea. ACM 978-1-4503-2745-9/14/04. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2579031. line Journals 2 . Many of these bibliographic archives provide APIs or are already published as Linked Data. Big national libraries are following this example. According to the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud stats 3 publication repositories are abundant 4 . Scholars have embraced Internet technologies in ways that broaden the scope of their research work be- yond college walls and in ways reaching beyond data silos forced by libraries. Microblog platforms such as Twitter can be a useful way to expand their community even further by following others and sharing research interests. We will describe in the following sections the model we developed for this purpose. We explain (i) which vocabular- ies used; (ii) the datasets selected for the implementation; (iii) our custom developed system for dynamic alignment of resources of social media, collaboration tools and selected datasets; and (iv) we evaluate the alignment and measure how well we can interlink conferences, publications and au- thors with scholar user profiles. 2. MODEL We collect and use data from resources already explored by other researchers: this is especially interesting for cases when looking for the next practical piece of information or when trying to find a solution for a problem that requires ‘outside-the-box’ thinking (e.g., when formulating the exact search query requires background knowledge of a domain unfamiliar to the researcher). The model shows in Figure 1 how the researchers interact with the research data. Figure 1: Interaction with research data. 2 http://online-journals.org/ 3 http://stats.lod2.eu/ 4 http://lod-cloud.net/state/