Publishing indico data in ConfIDent and allocating DOIs to events

Hi everybody,

I hope this is the right channel for this.

I am working in the DFG-funded (German Research Foundation) Project ConfIDent: Home - ConfIDent

We aim to make descriptive metadata on conferences and other formats of scientific events permanently accessible and register DOIs for those events. The ConfIDent platform we are developing is supposed to make this data easily searchable for researchers. We have high ambitions with regards to covering Science’s conference landscape. In contrast to institutions that already publish a lot of their conference information themselves e. g. via indico-functionalities we intend to gather events regardless of their institutional connections or disciplinary affiliation. One of our main goals is to connect scientific events with other important entities of the Science system like Proceedings and papers (DOIs), organisations (ROR IDs), people (ORCIDs), etc.

Currently, we are compiling different already existing data sources of scientific event metadata. Most of these data sources only contain information about past events, but most interesting to our users are future events. That is why we are thinking about alternative ways to acquire information about future events. Conference management systems like indico already capture a lot of the information about an event that could be of interest for researchers trying to find a suitable conference. So we thought: “Why not get the data directly from indico?” We would have the additional benefit that conference organizers wouldn’t have to populate two systems with more or less the same information.

The use case would pan out like this: The indico user would need to specify what information he wants to share and click a checkbox reading “upload selected metadata to ConfIDent”. The selected metadata would then be findable in ConfIDent by researchers all over the world and would be uniquely identifiable by receiving a DOI. Other services could again reuse this data since we intend to offer all our data under CC0.

Because it is open source, is widely in use with many institutions around the world and allows for the development of plugins we thought indico is a perfect conference management system to start this experiment with.

I am interested in your feedback first about the idea in general; do you think conference organizers would appreciate the extra exposure and DOIs for their events? Second, how feasible technically do you think developing this as an indico plugin is? I know that indico already allows for exporting data (all of it?) and ConfIDent will have an API through which events can be created.

Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Julian

Indico already offers the option to fetch event metadata, either as atom feed on the categories or as
type=“application/ld+json” embedded in the conference page HEAD (this is e.g. parsed by googlebot).

ld+json content example:

        {"@context":"http://schema.org",
 "@type":"Event","description":"Mobility is a fundamental ingredient of our present society.While it shapes our lives at the global and local scales, it also is responsible for about a quarter of the overall CO2 emissions. The mobility sector is actually the fastest growing source of global emissions.Improving the efficiency of energy use in transportation is thus an essential part of the present fight against the climate crisis. Neutron scattering methods offer a unique possibility to access the structure and dynamics down to the atomic scale and investigate the processes involved in many of the fields relevant to this question, to name a few: batteries and fuel cells electrodes, membranes light structural materials synthetic fuels CO2/pollutant capture chemical aspects, kinetics, phase transformations hydrogen: production, storage, conversion into power high-temperature materials This MLZ Conference aims to bring the very heterogeneous community of researchers working in those fields in contact with experts of the scattering community and to foster cross-disciplinary discussions. The main focus of the conference is on neutron methods, but complementary techniques will be covered as well.",
"endDate":"2022-06-03T19:00:00+02:00",
"image":"https://indico.frm2.tum.de/event/306/logo-1713683547.png",
"location":{"@type":"Place","address":"M\u00fcnchner Str. 25\n83661 Lenggries",
"name":"Arabella Brauneck Hotel"},
"name":"MLZ Conference 2022: Neutrons for Mobility",
"startDate":"2022-05-31T11:00:00+02:00",
"url":"https://indico.frm2.tum.de/event/306/"}

Thanks a lot! That’s great. Can this also be done for other types of indico data like for example participants?