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Project and history

About confref

Open identifiers and linked data for academic conference series and their editions.

In computer science and other fields, many results are published first at conferences. Unlike journals, which have the ISSN, conferences have no common identifier. Information about them (dates and places of the editions, the series, the proceedings) is spread over publishers, bibliographies, library catalogues and registries. confref links this information as open linked data and assigns each conference series and edition a stable identifier.

History

confref was founded in 2013 by Kai Eckert and Aliaksandr Birukou.

  • 2013–2015: Springer LOD. Aliaksandr Birukou (Springer) and Kai Eckert (University of Mannheim) start to publish the metadata of Springer’s conference proceedings as linked open data. lod.springer.com goes online in 2014; the public launch follows in 2015, under CC0. dblp and TU Wien are the first data providers.
  • 2015–2023: Stuttgart Media University. The project moves with Kai Eckert to Stuttgart Media University. In 2018 Springer Nature hands over the lod.springer.com data and the code of its conference portal, and Digital Science funds confref with a Catalyst Grant. portal.confref.org goes online in 2019 and lists about 38,000 conferences after the integration of dblp in 2020.
  • 2019–2023: persistent identifiers. confref takes part in the working group of Crossref and DataCite on persistent identifiers for conferences. From 2020, confref works with TIB Hannover on ConfIDent, a curated registry of academic events, and its data goes into ConfIDent. Results: Persistent Identification for Conferences (Data Science Journal 21, 2022, doi:10.5334/dsj-2022-011). TIB and Kai Eckert applied jointly to the DFG for funding to continue this work; the proposal was not granted.
  • Since 2023: Technische Hochschule Mannheim. With Kai Eckert’s move to TH Mannheim, the portal was discontinued and the work concentrated on the knowledge graph. Since 2026 confref is being rebuilt as an open knowledge graph: each source a separate dataset, every version kept, every dataset generated by code in a public repository.

Acknowledgements

Hosting

  • University of Mannheim, Data and Web Science Group, 2013–2015
  • Stuttgart Media University (Hochschule der Medien), 2015–2023

First data providers

  • dblp, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics: series, conferences and proceedings
  • TU Wien, Linked Data Lab: programme committees

Data and funding

  • Springer Nature: the lod.springer.com data and the code of the conference portal
  • Digital Science: the Catalyst Grant 2018–2019

Development and cooperation

  • Net Wise: the first implementation of portal.confref.org within the Catalyst Grant
  • TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology: ConfIDent and persistent identifiers

Principles

  • Open: all data CC0, unless a source requires otherwise; the dataset then states its licence.
  • Separate sources: the statements of a source are kept apart from what confref derives from them.
  • Persistent: identifiers are not reused; published versions are not changed.
  • Reproducible: every dataset is generated by code in a public repository from documented inputs.

Project home

confref is a project of the Research Group Prof. Dr. Kai Eckert at the Technische Hochschule Mannheim (Mannheim Technical University).