A Knowledge Graph of the Natal Bioinformatics Forum 2023 Speakers on Wikidata

Bioinformatics is a rapidly evolving field, and keeping track of the connections in the Brazilian bioinformatics community can be challenging. Targeting a small piece of this puzzle, in this poster, we describe the creation of a knowledge graph of the speakers at the Natal Bioinformatics Forum 2023 using Wikidata,  a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. 

We manually modeled the event metadata on the Wikidata GUI, and using Python and WebScraper, we scraped speaker information, which we reconciled with Wikidata using the wdcuration package. We improved the coverage of information about the speaker using the Author Disambiguator tool and the PyOrcidator package, adding connections to the knowledge graph where possible. Notably, most of the information was already available on the platform due to previous curations by the Wikidata metascientific community. 

By leveraging Wikidata’s 5-star linked open data model, we were able to generate various insightful visualizations. We generated a co-author graph of the speakers showing the collaboration relationships in the community, which highlighted Prof. Ana Tereza Vasconcelos as a collaboration “hub” in the network. Additionally, we gained insights about the speakers related to their topics of interest, the software and programming languages they have used, and their affiliations. The queries' result and source code are available in a real-time dashboard at https://lubianat.github.io/natal_bioinformatics2wikidata/ .

Our approach demonstrates a powerful way to analyze academic events in bioinformatics, bringing connections in the community to light and providing stepping stones for collaborations. We encourage others to use Wikidata to build their own knowledge graphs of events and communities and make ourselves available to help where needed. 


Funded by FAPESP Grant #19/26284-1