Scholarly Knowledge Graph Construction from Published Software Packages

Abstract: The value of structured scholarly knowledge for research and society at large is well understood, but producing scholarly knowledge (i.e., knowledge traditionally published in articles) in structured form remains a challenge. We propose an approach for automatically extracting scholarly knowledge from published software packages by static analysis of their metadata and contents (scripts and data) and populating a scholarly knowledge graph with the extracted knowledge. Our approach is based on mining scientific software packages linked to article publications by extracting metadata and analyzing the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the source code to obtain information about the used and produced data as well as operations performed on data. The resulting knowledge graph includes articles, software packages metadata, and computational techniques applied to input data utilized as materials in research work. The knowledge graph also includes the results reported as scholarly knowledge in articles.