The project aims at fostering Springer Nature editorial activities by supporting them with a variety of smart solutions leveraging artificial intelligence, data mining, and semantic technologies. In particular, the KMi team will support Springer Nature editorial team in classifying proceedings and other editorial products, taking informed decisions about their marketing strategy, and improve their internal classification.

Our team and Springer Nature have been collaborating since 2015 in the development of an array of semantically-enhanced solutions supporting editors in i) classifying proceedings and other editorial products with respect to the relevant research areas and ii) taking informed decisions about their marketing strategy. These solutions include:

1. The creation of a portal for releasing the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale ontology of research areas that was automatically generated using the Klink-2 algorithm on the Rexplore dataset. The portal will enable to browse, download, and offer feedback on CSO. Currently, we provide two versions of CSO: CSO 1.0 (stable, 15k topics and 96k relationships), and CSO 2.0 (last version, 26k topics, 226k relationships). You can browse CSO on the CSO Portal.
2. The CSO Classifier is a new unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a comprehensive ontology of research areas in the field of Computer Science. The CSO Classifier takes as input the metadata associated with a research paper (title, abstract, keywords) and returns a selection of research concepts drawn from the ontology. A web application for trying the CSO Classifier is available at https://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk/classify/.
3. The development of Smart Topic Miner, a tool which uses semantic web technologies to classify scholarly publications on the basis of a very large automatically generated ontology of research areas. It was developed to support the Springer Nature Computer Science editorial team in classifying proceedings. A demo of the system is available at http://stm-demo.kmi.open.ac.uk.
4. The Smart Book Recommender, which assists editors in deciding which editorial products should be marketed in a specific venue. It takes as input the proceedings of a conference and suggests books, journals, and other conference proceedings which are likely to be relevant to the attendees of the conference in question. A demo for SBR is available at http://rexplore.kmi.open.ac.uk/SBR-demo/.
5. An automatically generated ontology of research topics in the Engineering field. To this end, we plan to create a new version of Klink, which is an algorithm that combines semantic technologies, machine learning, and knowledge from external sources to automatically generate a fully populated ontology of research areas.

In May 2019, as evidence for this successful collaboration, we renewed it with further objectives, including the creation variety of analytics solutions for analysing conferences, journals, books, organisations, topics and other research entities. In particular, we will focus on a Conference Dashboard, which will support editors in assessing the quality, impact, and trends of conferences. We will also focus on segmenting Springer Nature customers based on their interest (content they read) and support the Marketing department in tailoring their product packages.

More info

Springer Nature

Springer Nature is a leading research, educational and professional publisher, providing quality content to our communities through a range of innovative platforms, products and services. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals and resources reach millions of people – helping researchers, students, teachers and professionals to discover, learn and achieve more. Through our family of brands, we aim to serve and support the research, education and professional communities by putting them at the heart of all we do, delivering the highest possible standards in content and technology, and helping shape the future of publishing for their benefit and for society overall. Visit: springernature.com/group and follow @SpringerNature.

Relevant papers

Springer Nature collaboration

• Osborne, F., Salatino, A., Birukou, A., Thanapalasingam, T., and Motta, E. (2017) Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies. International Semantic Web Conference 2017, Industry Track. Vienna, Austria.

Computer Science Ontology

• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Birukou, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2019) The Computer Science Ontology: A Comprehensive Automatically-Generated Taxonomy of Research Areas, Data Intelligence, pp. (In Press)
• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas, The International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, California, USA

CSO Classifier

• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F., Thanapalasingam, T. and Motta, E. (2019) The CSO Classifier: Ontology-Driven Detection of Research Topics in Scholarly Articles, TPDL 2019: 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Oslo, Norway
• Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) Classifying Research Papers with the Computer Science Ontology, Poster at International Semantic Web Conference, Posters & Demonstrations and Industry Tracks, MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, USA

Smart Topic Miner

• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2019) Improving Editorial Workflow and Metadata Quality at Springer Nature, The 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019), Auckland, New Zealand
• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2019) Smart Topics Miner 2: Improving Proceedings Retrievability at Springer Nature, 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019): Posters & Demonstrations, Industry and Outrageous Ideas Tracks, Auckland, New Zeeland
• Osborne, F., Salatino, A., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2016) Automatic Classification of Springer Nature Proceedings with Smart Topic Miner. International Semantic Web Conference 2016, Kobe, Japan. – slides

Smart Book recommender

• Thanapalasingam, T., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2018) Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products, The International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, California, USA
• Thanapalasingam, T., Osborne, F., Birukou, A. and Motta, E. (2018) The Smart Book Recommender: An Ontology-Driven Application for Recommending Editorial Products, Demo at International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, California, USA
• Osborne, F., Birukou, A., Thanapalasingam, T. , and Motta, E. (2017) Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products. International Semantic Web Conference 2017, Poster Track. Vienna, Austria.

Klink algorithm

• Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2015) Klink-2: Integrating Multiple Web Sources to Generate Semantic Topic Networks, International Semantic Web Conference 2015, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

PhD work funded by Springer Nature

• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2018, Fort Worth, Texas
• Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E., 2017. How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas. PeerJ Computer Science, 3, p.e119.