Top topics through time in Scholia

Posted on October 17, 2022

Based on a remark in the paper Leveraging Knowledge Graph Technologies to Assess Journals and Conferences at Springer Nature from the International Semantic Web Conference 2022 about Scholia, “One drawback of this tool [i.e., Scholia] is that the topics are associated to venues as a whole and cannot be used to evaluate their temporal evolution”, we have implemented new panels on the venue aspect and on the event-series aspect. The panels show the top five most frequent topics through the years for a venue or event-series with an area chart.

The result of these visualization are graphs that show the limitation of the data in Wikidata and perhaps also some insights to the evolution of scientific fields. The plot below is a screenshot from Scholia for the International Semantic Web Conference:

This plot shows the uneven annotation we have for the proceedings article for the conference. It also shows the appearance of the concept “knowledge graph” in the 2017 proceedings and the appearance of “Wikidata” in the 2014 proceedings.

Another example is for Astronomy and Astrophysics where – according to the annotation in Wikidata – the topic of extrasolar planets appears around 1996.