SciLake is in full swing with its pilot programs in the fields of neuroscience, cancer research, transportation, and energy. These initiatives aim to create or enrich domain-specific Scientific Knowledge Graphs that capture valuable knowledge from each scientific field.

June 11, 2024

The SciLake Cancer Pilot is developing a first-of-its-kind cancer knowledge graph, with the aim to make public resources in biology and cancer more accessible to the research community.

The case study in focus is Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL), the most prevalent adult leukemia. The cancer knowledge graph will assist in discovering essential biomarkers for personalised treatment and care, a critical step towards achieving precision medicine.

Leading the pilot are researchers from the Centre for Research and Technology in Greece and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

SciLake representatives participated in the 2024 Transportation Research Arena, where they presented on the use of Knowledge Graphs in Transport Research. This article recaps the key points from their contribution.

Jun 10, 2024 

The Transportation Research Arena (TRA) is the largest research and technology conference on transport and mobility in Europe. The 2024 edition took place from April 15 to 18, 2024, in Dublin, Ireland, and focused on "Transport Transitions: Advancing Sustainable and Inclusive Mobility". The conference gave researchers, industry professionals, policymakers, and other stakeholders from all transport modes an opportunity to shape research and transport policy. Key attendees included the European Commission, various European Research Advisory Councils and Technology Platforms, and the European Transport Research Alliance.

Afroditi Anagnostopoulou and Xenophon Kitsios, researchers from the Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT) at CERTH, showcased the SciLake transport pilot, with a presentation entitled "AI-assisted services for content acquisition and creation interlinking in transport research" in the session "National and Cross-Border Data Interoperability".

Knowledge Graphs in Transport Research

The pilot explores using Knowledge Graphs (KGs) in maritime transport research for:

• Semantic search: Retrieve relevant information and answer complex queries.
• Recommendation systems: Understand user preferences and item attributes.
• Question answering: Extract key information from large knowledge bases to answer user queries.
• Natural language processing: Recognise entities, perform sentiment analyses, and summarise text using semantic context.

Who can benefit?

Content Providers: To automatically verify compliance of exported records with set guidelines

Research Organisations: To support the adoption of Open Science publishing practices and monitor the implementation of Open Science practices by their researchers

Public Authorities: To control the impact of their funding within the Transport research community

What information is included?

• Results representing the outcomes of research activities
• Projects funded by research grants
• Data sources from which graph object metadata is collected
• Communities, or groups of people with a common research intent
• Organizations, including companies, research institutions, and public authorities

Use cases

The pilot has yielded some preliminary results and identified use cases such as:

• 1st scenario: interest of researchers in available software that provides algorithms
• 2nd scenario: use of datasets for optimisation purposes in the transportation sector
• 3rd scenario: publications about “automation” in various transportation domains.

Conclusions & Future Research

In summary, the presentation underscored our commitment to advancing transport research, with a key focus on open-access resources and reproducibility. There is promising ongoing work in SciLake to develop domain-specific Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and AI-assisted services for scientific content acquisition and interlinking.

Currently, two "sub-graphs" are under development: one for the Maritime Transport sector, and another for the Cooperative Connected Automated Mobility (CCAM) sector.

This work has been positively received by representatives of the European Commission and professionals in the maritime transport sector, who see value in the research support and collaboration opportunities that SciLake provides.

Learn more about our pilots:

SciLake is in full swing with its pilot programs in the fields of neuroscience, cancer research, transportation, and energy. These initiatives aim to create or enrich domain-specific Scientific Knowledge Graphs that capture valuable knowledge from each scientific field.

May 30, 2024

The SciLake Neuroscience Pilot aims to enrich the EBRAINS digital research infrastructure in order to improve data connectivity with scientific articles and identify trends and gaps in neuroscience research through advanced analytics.

Leading the pilot are researchers of the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure, from the University of Oslo.

On April 10th, 2024, Thanasis Vergoulis from Athena RC, project coordinator of SciLake, represented our project at the EOSC-CoARA workshop for advancing research assessment, presenting how SciLake is contributing to  open infrastructures for research assessment. This blog post summarizes the key takeaways from the event.

May 30, 2024

CoARA and EOSC Commitments

The workshop hosted discussions on advancing the European Research Area's Policy Agenda for 2022-2024 focusing on promoting open sharing and reuse of research outputs and improving research assessment systems (i.e., Actions 1 and 2). To this end, the workshop aimed at collaboration and strategic alignment between the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), two relevant, pivotal initiatives:  CoARA aims to reform research assessment practices and policies to recognize a broader range of scientific contributions while promoting transparency and inclusivity. EOSC, on the other hand, provides the necessary infrastructure for easy access to research data across Europe. Together, they ensure that the new assessment criteria encouraged by CoARA align with the open and interoperable data environment EOSC provides. This collaboration fosters a research landscape that is more collaborative, transparent, inclusive, and effective in advancing open science principles across Europe.

In this context, SciLake, PathOS, OPUS, and GraspOS have been invited to inform stakeholders about their project goals and status. Their mission is to align with the overarching vision of the European Commission, EOSC, and CoARA in reforming research assessment. The discussion contributed to the publication of the European Commission's Action Plan To Implement The Ten Commitments On The Agreement on Reforming the Research Assessment.

SciLake's Mission

As an INFRAEOSC project, SciLake is expected to have substantial and long-term impact in the EOSC ecosystem. During the workshop, Thanasis Vergoulis presented the main objectives of our project highlighting its three key contributions in the  research assessment field:

1. Enhancing the interoperability and accessibility of Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs)

Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) form the fundamental input for research assessment practices. Enhancing the interoperability and accessibility of SKGs is a key focus of SciLake, and thus SciLake is expected to significantly facilitate research assessment practices. SciLake researchers collaborate closely with the members of the Research Data Alliance's (RDA) SKG-Interoperability Framework group to refine a common data exchange model for domain-agnostic SKGs. At the same time, SciLake extends this work by leading the effort to design extensions to the basic SKG-IF model, supporting domain-specific entities and relationship types in the fields of the project pilots. Regarding accessibility, SciLake’s APIs offer advanced graph querying capabilities through the AvantGraph analytics engine. This enhances the simplicity and efficiency of SKG querying, aiding in the revelation of research insights and further supporting effective research assessment.

2. Developing modules that provide enrichments for research data that can be valuable for research assessment use cases.

Among the various modules SciLake is developing, some are specifically designed to add value to research data, making them highly beneficial for implementing research assessment practices. Indicative examples include the module that produces classifications of research works based on relevant Fields of Science and the modules that calculate a range of indicators that can offer valuable insights into various aspects of citation-based scientific impact or the reproducibility of research works.

3. Recognising and incorporating discipline-specific contributions.

SciLake is closely collaborating with domain experts conducting four pilots focused on analyzing research in distinct scientific fields: Neuroscience, Cancer research, Transportation research, and Energy research. This work is invaluable for identifying domain-specific research activities and contributions, enabling them to be effectively tracked and recognized within research assessment practices.

Conclusions

In conclusion, SciLake is contributing to research assessment through its innovations in the field of Scientific Knowledge Graphs enhancing their interoperability, generating deeper research insights, and incorporating discipline-specific contributions. Through these efforts, SciLake is laying the groundwork for a more cohesive and responsible approach to research assessment.

The slides of the presentation can be found on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/10959719