Conference around stories of data makers of any form from any discipline. https://csvconf.com/

4th-5th May 2021

• Peter Murray-Rust
• Ambreen Hamadani
• Shweata N. Hegde

There are 10,000 scientific papers published every day and we’re using the data in them to tackle global challenges. Our tools could have searched the existing literature to warn of the West African Ebola epidemic. Like viral epidemics, we face many other global challenges that have solutions hidden in the literature. With the scientific output growing by 2 papers every minute, how can researchers, let alone citizens make complete sense of it?

Driven by the pressing needs of the pandemic, a diverse group of young bioscientists from across rural and urban geographies of India, came together to form openVirus. Under the mentorship of Dr Peter Murray-Rust and Dr Gitanjali Yadav, we are working towards automating the “making sense” process. In other words, we are text mining thousands of papers from the scientific literature to gather insights.

Our project is centred around:
i. Europe PMC (EPMC, repository with millions of open access papers in XML)
ii. Wikidata (a revolutionary universal ontology with 100 million Items), Wikipedia’s sister project

We make tools for:
i. web scraping EPMC - rapidly query and download papers in bulk
ii. creating semantic multilingual dictionaries from Wikidata
iii. Semantic annotation of sections in papers

Many of the team members speak Indic languages. Therefore, the tools we develop must be inclusive of diversity. Wikidata has been game-changing for the project. Not only does it allow us to annotate papers coherently, but also helps us introduce multi linguality to our workflow. Science and global challenges belong to everybody, and so we follow Open Notebook philosophy where all our output is made immediately available CC BY and CC 0.

We’ve now extended to the global problem of invasive species and working on a game to involve citizens in science.