The AIDA Dashboard: A Web Application for Assessing and Comparing Scientific Conferences

Abstract

Scientific conferences are essential for developing active research communities, promoting the cross-pollination of ideas and technologies, bridging between academia and industry, and disseminating new findings. Analyzing and monitoring scientific conferences is thus crucial for all users who need to take informed decisions in this space. However, scholarly search engines and bibliometric applications only provide a limited set of analytics for assessing research conferences, preventing us from performing a comprehensive analysis of these events. In this paper, we introduce the AIDA Dashboard, a novel web application, developed in collaboration with Springer Nature, for analyzing and comparing scientific conferences. This tool introduces three major new features: 1) it enables users to easily compare conferences within specific fields (e.g., Digital Libraries) and time-frames (e.g., the last five years); 2) it characterises conferences according to a 14K research topics from the Computer Science Ontology (CSO); and 3) it provides several functionalities for assessing the involvement of commercial organizations, including the ability to characterize industrial contributions according to 66 industrial sectors (e.g., automotive, financial, energy, electronics) from the Industrial Sectors Ontology (INDUSO). We evaluated the AIDA Dashboard by performing both a quantitative evaluation and a user study, obtaining excellent results in terms of quality of the analytics and usability.