Abstract A key limiting factor in organising and using information from physical specimens curated in natural science collections is making that information computable, with institutional digitization tending to focus more on imaging the specimens themselves than on efficiently capturing computable data about them. Label data are traditionally manually transcribed today with high cost and low throughput, rendering such a task constrained for many collection-holding institutions at current funding levels. We show how computer vision, optical character recognition, handwriting recognition, named entity recognition and language translation technologies can be implemented into canonical workflow component libraries with findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) characteristics. These libraries are being developed in a cloud-based workflow platform—the ‘Specimen Data Refinery’ (SDR)—founded on Galaxy workflow engine, Common Workflow Language, Research Object Crates (RO-Crate) and WorkflowHub technologies. The SDR can be applied to specimens’ labels and other artefacts, offering the prospect of greatly accelerated and more accurate data capture in computable form. Two kinds of FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) are created by packaging outputs of SDR workflows and workflow components as digital objects with metadata, a persistent identifier, and a specific type definition. The first kind of FDO are computable Digital Specimen (DS) objects that can be consumed/produced by workflows, and other applications. A single DS is the input data structure submitted to a workflow that is modified by each workflow component in turn to produce a refined DS at the end. The Specimen Data Refinery provides a library of such components that can be used individually, or in series. To cofunction, each library component describes the fields it requires from the DS and the fields it will in turn populate or enrich. The second kind of FDO, RO-Crates gather and archive the diverse set of digital and real-world resources, configurations, and actions (the provenance) contributing to a unit of research work, allowing that work to be faithfully recorded and reproduced. Here we describe the Specimen Data Refinery with its motivating requirements, focusing on what is essential in the creation of canonical workflow component libraries and its conformance with the requirements of an emerging FDO Core Specification being developed by the FDO Forum.

Abstract The UK Catalysis Hub (UKCH) is designing a virtual research environment to support data processing and analysis, the Catalysis Research Workbench (CRW). The development of this platform requires identifying the processing and analysis needs of the UKCH members and mapping them to potential solutions. This paper presents a proposal for a demonstrator to analyse the use of scientific workflows for large scale data processing. The demonstrator provides a concrete target to promote further discussion of the processing and analysis needs of the UKCH community. In this paper, we will discuss the main requirements for data processing elicited and the proposed adaptations that will be incorporated in the design of the CRW and how to integrate the proposed solutions with existing practices of the UKCH. The demonstrator has been used in discussion with researchers and in presentations to the UKCH community, generating increased interest and motivating further development.

Recent success of knowledge graphs has spurred interest in applying them in open science, such as on intelligent survey systems for scientists. However, efforts to understand the quality of candidate survey questions provided by these methods have been limited. Indeed, existing methods do not consider the type of on-the-fly content planning that is possible for face-to-face surveys and hence do not guarantee that selection of subsequent questions is based on response to previous questions in a survey. To address this limitation, we propose a dynamic and informative solution for an intelligent survey system that is based on knowledge graphs. To illustrate our proposal, we look into social science surveys, focusing on ordering the questions of a questionnaire component by their level of acceptance, along with conditional triggers that further customise participants' experience. Our main findings are: (i) evaluation of the proposed approach shows that the dynamic component can be beneficial in terms of lowering the number of questions asked per variable, thus allowing more informative data to be collected in a survey of equivalent length; and (ii) a primary advantage of the proposed approach is that it enables grouping of participants according to their responses, so that participants are not only served appropriate follow-up questions, but their responses to these questions may be analysed in the context of some initial categorisation. We believe that the proposed approach can easily be applied to other social science surveys based on grouping definitions in their contexts. The knowledge-graph-based intelligent survey approach proposed in our work allows online questionnaires to approach face-to-face interaction in their level of informativity and responsiveness, as well as duplicating certain advantages of interview-based data collection.

The FAIR data guiding principles have been recently developed and widely adopted to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets in the face of an exponential increase of data volume and complexity. The FAIR data principles have been formulated on a general level and the technological implementation of these principles remains up to the industries and organizations working on maximizing the value of their data. Here, we describe the data management and curation methodologies and best practices developed for FAIRification of clinical exploratory biomarker data collected from over 250 clinical studies. We discuss the data curation effort involved, the resulting output, and the business and scientific impact of our work. Finally, we propose prospective planning for FAIR data to optimize data management efforts and maximize data value.

Personalized search is a promising way to improve the quality of Websearch, and it has attracted much attention from both academic and industrial communities. Much of the current related research is based on commercial search engine data, which can not be released publicly for such reasons as privacy protection and information security. This leads to a serious lack of accessible public data sets in this field. The few publicly available data sets have not become widely used in academia because of the complexity of the processing process required to study personalized search methods. The lack of data sets together with the difficulties of data processing has brought obstacles to fair comparison and evaluation of personalized search models. In this paper, we constructed a large-scale data set AOL4PS to evaluate personalized search methods, collected and processed from AOL query logs. We present the complete and detailed data processing and construction process. Specifically, to address the challenges of processing time and storage space demands brought by massive data volumes, we optimized the process of data set construction and proposed an improved BM25 algorithm. Experiments are performed on AOL4PS with some classic and state-of-the-art personalized search methods, and the experiment results demonstrate that AOL4PS can measure the effect of personalized search models.

With the technological development of entity extraction, relationship extraction, knowledge reasoning, and entity linking, the research on knowledge graph has been carried out in full swing in recent years. To better promote the development of knowledge graph, especially in the Chinese language and in the financial industry, we built a high-quality data set, named financial research report knowledge graph (FR2KG), and organized the automated construction of financial knowledge graph evaluation at the 2020 China Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing Conference (CCKS2020). FR2KG consists of 17,799 entities, 26,798 relationship triples, and 1,328 attribute triples covering 10 entity types, 19 relationship types, and 6 attributes. Participants are required to develop a constructor that will automatically construct a financial knowledge graph based on the FR2KG. In addition, we summarized the technologies for automatically constructing knowledge graphs, and introduced the methods used by the winners and the results of this evaluation.

In the multi-billion dollar formulated product industry, state of the art continues to rely heavily on experts during the “generate, make and test” steps of formulation design. We propose automation aids to each step with a knowledge graph of relevant information as the central artifact. The generate step usually focuses on coming up with new recipes for intended formulation. We propose to aid the experts who generally carry out this step manually by providing a recommendation system and a templating system on top of the knowledge graph. Using the former, the expert can create a recipe from scratch using historical formulations and related data. With the latter, the expert starts with a recipe template created by our system and substitutes the requisite constituents to form a recipe. In the current state of practice, the three steps mentioned above operate in a fragmented manner wherein observations from one step do not aid other steps in a streamlined manner. Instead of manually operated labs for the make and test steps, we assume automated or robotic labs and in-silico testing, respectively. Using two formulations, namely face cream and an exterior coating, we show how the knowledge graph may help integrate and streamline the communication between the generate, the make, and the test steps. Our initial exploration shows considerable promise.

Abstract There is a growing interest in developing human-computer dialogue systems which is an important branch in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). However, the evaluation of large-scale Chinese human-computer dialogues is still a challenging task. To attract more attention to dialogue evaluation work, we held the fourth Evaluation of Chinese Human-Computer Dialogue Technology (ECDT). It consists of few-shot learning in spoken language understanding (SLU) (Task 1) and knowledge-driven multi-turn dialogue competition (Task 2), the data sets of which are provided by Harbin Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University. In this paper, we will introduce the evaluation tasks and data sets in detail. Meanwhile, we will also analyze the evaluation results and the existing problems in the evaluation.

The Open Science (OS) movement has achieved extraordinary results in very few years. In this paper I argue it is now necessary to embed OS in the wider ecosystem of research and innovation, acknowledging some of the outstanding issues that need to be resolved as it beds down into the way research is done in the future. By sticking to a purest approach to OS its impact and current momentum may be lost. Digital technologies and global connectivity have ensured that OS is here to stay and will continue to expand its influence in the future. However, OS cannot stand aloof from what is the reality of what is happening elsewhere otherwise it will do a disservice to itself and the challenges facing the world.

Much research is dependent on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Researchers in different research domains have set up their own ICT systems (data labs) to support their research, from data collection (observation, experiment, simulation) through analysis (analytics, visualisation) to publication. However, too frequently the Digital Objects (DOs) upon which the research results are based are not curated and thus neither available for reproduction of the research nor utilization for other (e.g., multidisciplinary) research purposes. The key to curation is rich metadata recording not only a description of the DO and the conditions of its use but also the provenance – the trail of actions performed on the DO along the research workflow. There are increasing real-world requirements for multidisciplinary research. With DOs in domain-specific ICT systems (silos), commonly with inadequate metadata, such research is hindered. Despite wide agreement on principles for achieving FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) utilization of research data, current practices fall short. FAIR DOs offer a way forward. The paradoxes, barriers and possible solutions are examined. The key is persuading the researcher to adopt best practices which implies decreasing the cost (easy to use autonomic tools) and increasing the benefit (incentives such as acknowledgement and citation) while maintaining researcher independence and flexibility.