Involvement of User Groups

ConfIDent aims to develop a platform for scientific events that is specifically tailored to the needs of users. Therefore, it follows a user-oriented approach to ensure

• that the platform is easy and intuitive to use and
• that the user can effectively and efficiently achieve the desired result while interacting with the system.

User requirements for the platform and the service will be defined and analsyed by interviews and usability tests. The analysis results of the user requirements form the basis for the identification of the functionalities and the visualization of the platform. Potential users from the identified user groups are included in the survey and cooperate with the developers already in the early phase of the specification. On the basis of the results of the user needs analysis, the TIB draws up a catalogue of requirements for the design of the functionalities and the user interface.

Metadata for Scientific Events

Information about conferences and other scientific events is often on non-permanent conference websites or scattered across platforms with different standards. The quality of metadata also varies greatly from source to source: it is often unstructured and not searchable. The aim of ConfIDent is to make metadata on conferences and other scientific event formats available in an open, standardised and long-term manner.

To achieve this, persistent identifiers (PIDs) developed by the DOI registration agencies DataCite and Crossref together with an international working group  will be used for the project. These PIDs enable to reference scientific events unambiguously. The standardised collection of metadata on scientific events via PIDs will allow it to make them permanently searchable, accessible, interoperable and reusable in accordance with FAIR principles. On the basis of standardised data, the project will also examine how alternative metrics and quality indicators for conferences can be developed.

Technical Base

Rather than creating, managing and curating event information centrally, ConfIDent would like to encourage users to do this in a collaborative and crowdsourcing manner. Stakeholders with various interests like researchers, conference organizers, publishers, funding organizations, etc. can contribute to the lifecycle of event data. To empower these user communities, it is planned to use an instance of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) as the technical base and customize it to our project needs. SMW allows not only free, collaborative content creation and semantic annotations but also guided input using a predefined scheme.These features allow to create a flexible, extensible and structured knowledge representation. SMW also has advanced features such as versioning, semantic search & queries and connections to external data sources such as Linked Open Data (LOD).