MetaScience: An Holistic Approach for Research Modeling

Conferences have become primary sources of dissemination in computer science research, in particular, in the software engineering and database fields. Assessing the quality, scope and community of conferences is therefore crucial for any researcher. However, digital libraries and online bibliographic services offer little help on this, thus providing only basic metrics. Researchers are instead forced to resort to the tedious task of manually browsing different sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar or conference sites) to gather relevant information about a given venue. In this paper we propose a conceptual schema providing a holistic view of conference-related information (e.g., authors, papers, committees and topics). This schema is automatically and incrementally populated with data available online. We show how this schema can be used as a single information source for a variety of complex queries and metrics to characterize the ER conference. Our approach has been implemented and made available online.