Robustifying Scholia: paving the way for knowledge discovery and research assessment through Wikidata

Abstract

Knowledge workers like researchers, students, journalists, research evaluators or funders need tools to explore what is known, how it was discovered, who made which contributions, and where the scholarly record has gaps. Existing tools and services of this kind are not available as Linked Open Data, but Wikidata is. It has the technology, active contributor base, and content to build a large-scale knowledge graph for scholarship, also known as WikiCite. Scholia visualizes this graph in an exploratory interface with profiles and links to the literature. However, it is just a working prototype. This project aims to "robustify Scholia" with back-end development and testing based on pilot corpora. The main objective at this stage is to attain stability in challenging cases such as server throttling and handling of large or incomplete datasets. Further goals include integrating Scholia with data curation and manuscript writing workflows, serving more languages, generating usage stats, and documentation.