New project to develop and enhance the OpenCitations Corpus announced | Oxford e-Research Centre

"The OpenCitations Enhancement Project, a new project to develop and enhance the OpenCitations Corpus, has been announced, with support from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for 18 months from May 2017.

The Foundation funds research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics, including a number of key technology projects relating to scholarly communication.

Silvio Peroni of the University of Bologna is Principle Applicant on the successful Sloan Foundation application to fund the OpenCitations Enhancement Project, with the Centre's Director, Professor Dave De Roure, as Co-Applicant. Dr David Shotton, the Centre's Senior Research and Emeritus Fellow, is Consultant Co-Investigator on the project.

The OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) is an open scholarly citation database that freely and legally makes available accurate citation data (academic references) to assist scholars with their academic studies, and to provide information to the wider public. The OpenCitations Enhancement Project will make the OCC more useful to the academic community both by significantly expanding the volume of citation data held within the Corpus, and by developing novel data visualizations and query services over the stored data.

A post-doctoral computer science research engineer will be recruited to start in the autumn specifically to develop information visualisation interfaces and sense-making tools that will both provide smart ways of envisaging and comprehending the citation data stored within the Corpus, and will also ease the task of manual curation."