All posts by Silvio Peroni

About Silvio Peroni

I (ORCiD: 0000-0003-0530-4305) hold a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, where I teach Basic Informatics (Bachelor’s degree in Humanities), Computational Thinking and Programming, Data Science and Open Science (Master’s degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge). I am an expert in document markup and semantic descriptions of bibliographic entities using OWL ontologies. I am one of the main developers of the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies, Director (with David Shotton) of OpenCitations, and founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA). My work on Semantic Publishing topics has been published by Springer in a book entitled Semantic Web Technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing. I count several publications international journals – including Semantic Web, Web Semantics, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, PeerJ Computer Science, and Scientometrics – and presentations in important international conferences. I am an Editorial Board member of Data Science, PeerJ Computer Science, Frontiers in Research Metrics & Analytics, and Research Ideas and Outcomes, and I have been in the Program Committee and in the Organising Committee of the most important international conferences and workshops related to Web and Semantic Web technologies. I am director of the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata, member of the Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (/DH.arc), part of the Advisory Board of DBLP and Qeios, Ambassador of Figshare and PeerJ, and member of the Association for Computing Machinery, of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, and of the Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale. Among my research interests are Semantic Web technologies, markup languages for complex documents, design patterns for digital documents and ontology modelling, and automatic processes of analysis and segmentation of documents. My works concern theoretical studies and technical implementation of tools to foster semantic interoperability of Open Science services and infrastructures, the empirical analysis of the nature of scholarly citations, bibliometrics and scientometrics studies, visualisation and browsing interfaces for semantic data, and the development of ontologies to manage, integrate and query bibliographic information.

W-log #8: An event on interdisciplinarity, more open citations available, UNIBO position paper on research

What happened? As introduced in one of the previous posts, the University of Bologna is organising a series of events dedicated to research fundamentals. On the 20th of May, a half-day conference devoted entirely to reliability, transparency, and reproducibility involved several national and international experts on the topic, who were engaged in keynote speeches and round tables. On the 9th of October, the new event of the series will be dedicated to the concept of interdisciplinarity. The event webpage includes the agenda and a registration form. The event is free and can be followed either in person or online. I hope to see you there!

What I did. At the beginning of August, we uploaded a paper describing the OpenCitations Index on arXiv, which has been accepted in Scientometrics. This work – coauthored with Ivan, Arianna and Marta – introduces the recent effort we have conducted at OpenCitations to revise the ingestion workflow of bibliographic metadata and citation data from five different sources (Crossref, DataCite, PubMed, OpenAIRE, JaLC) and integrate all their citations data into one collection, i.e. the Index, of over 2 billion unique citation links, which can be systematically accessed and queried through several services, including REST APIs and dataset dumps in various formats.

What to read. As an outcome of the first event of the series mentioned above, the University of Bologna has produced a position paper which highlights, enriched by the perspectives of international experts, the point of view and recommendation of the University on the reliability, transparency and reproducibility in research:

Credi, A., Masini, F., Diciotti, S., Forni, M., Peroni, S., Coppini, S., & Gualandi, B. (2024). Back to the Fundamentals of Research: Reliability, Transparency and Reproducibility. Position Paper [Position paper]. Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna. https://doi.org/10.6092/unibo/amsacta/7803