Event Series Completion as a Prerequisite Towards a Gold Standard Scientific Event Corpus

Scientific activities based on interaction in the social network manifested by scien- tific meetings revolve around authors, papers, proceedings, events and event series. The links and traces between these core entities form the conceptual scientific knowledge graph. Com- mercial and non-commercial players implement this conceptual graph as an interlinked network of scientific knowledge graphs by supplying infrastructure, metadata and software. Metadata about scientific events and event series are key connecting parts of these graphs. Scholars need to easily navigate these graphs – be it in hypertext form as links or via queries. FAIR Navigabil- ity without obstacles is a prerequisite for use cases such as bibliographic reference management or the organization of future events. Digital bi-directional traceability from any node in the conceptual knowledge graph to any other is not possible if the quality of metadata about events and event series is so low that in effect the necessary links are missing, broken or otherwise being obstacles. References to events and event series are the base source of these links in the conceptual scientific knowledge graph. However, most of these references are still majorly kept as natural language bibliographic references and therefore are ambiguous and error prone. While there are already persistent identifiers (PIDs) for papers, people and organizations to clearly identify the corresponding link target and point to a corresponding corpus or infrastructure, there is no such solution for de-referencing PIDs based on an event corpus for scientific events. Even if an event may be identified and metadata be found in one of the data sources, the crucial metadata that links the event to its event series and thus to the history of the event series is too often incomplete or missing. This mostly empirical work presents a scientific event corpus covering more than 10 different sources and proposes necessary and viable steps to make event series completion possible as a prerequisite towards a gold standard scientific event corpus