Linked Open Citation Database: Enabling Libraries to Contribute to an Open and Interconnected Citation Graph

Abstract

Citations play a crucial role in the scientific discourse, in information retrieval, and in bibliometrics. Many initiatives are currently promoting the idea of having free and open citation data. Creation of citation data, however, is not part of the cataloguing workflow in libraries nowadays. In this paper, we present our project Linked Open Citation Database, in which we design distributed processes and a system infrastructure based on linked data technology. The goal is to show that efficiently cataloguing citations in libraries using a semi-automatic approach is possible. We specifically describe the current state of the workflow and its implementation. We show that we could significantly improve the automatic reference extraction that is crucial for the subsequent data curation. We further give insights on the curation and linking process and provide evaluation results that not only direct the further development of the project, but also allow us to discuss its overall feasibility.