ConfIDent – A reliable platform for scientific events

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Stefan Decker, since 10/2019; Dr. Irina Sens
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426477583

ConfIDent aims to develop a service platform for the quality-driven, collaborative curation of semantically structured metadata of scientific events. It will provide reliable and transparent data and workflows for researchers (organizers, speakers, participants) as well as other stakeholders of scientific events such as university administrations, libraries, sponsors, publishers or specialised societies. Starting with two pilot communities – computer science and research on transport and mobility – the objective is to identify user needs to foster usability and acceptance of the platform. Its functionalities will be optimized through an iterative process. The long-term objective is to reuse the results from the project as a model to offer a generic platform for the sciences and technology communities that meets general academic demands and allows community specific modifications concerning, e.g., quality criteria or the form and significance of conference proceedings.The sustainability of the service will not only be obtained by this user-centred approach but also by connecting it to existing services enabling data exchange, and by the commitment to the FAIR principles. ConfIDent will reach the current desideratum of long-term findable, open, referenceable and reusable metadata on scientific events such as conferences. The project is based on the already existing OpenResearch.org platform which uses semantic descriptions of scientific events. Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) serves as a data curation interface. The definition of metadata requirements is used to structure content information, to assign persistent identifier (PID) to scientific events and to adjust criteria to assess the quality of event data. The development and application of a versatile toolkit allows data providers and users to choose between levels of data granularity in order to adapt the selection of quality criteria to their needs. ConfIDent will allow further analysis of event metadata and will help developing specific indicators and metrics to provide a higher visibility of scientific events as an independent achievement of research and as part of the life cycle of research: The data can cover context information on Call for Papers, proceedings, conference recordings, contributors, connected research data, conference series, or research topics.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Christoph Lange-Bever, until 10/2019