Want to increase your field’s representation in the ORKG? Want to provide a service to your scientific community (and get acknowledged for it)? Run an ORKG Observatory!
The role of an observatory is to organize research in a certain field and ensure a high quality standard. How this is done in practice is up to the Observatory and highly dependent on the research field. To maintain a flexible structure and be able to include different disciplines' requirements, we do not make strict rules on what an Observatory's tasks are, but provide some suggestions on what Observatories could do:
In turn, Observatories will be prominently featured on all content pages related to their field. As ORKG comparisons receive a doi and are citable, your work will be recognized by your community. You will also be in close contact to the ORKG development team, so that your issues, wishes and feature requests will be prioritized.
You can find a list of existing Observatories here.
If you are interested in running an Observatory or if you have further questions, please contact us at info@orkg.org. We will be happy to help.
We envision that organizations take stewardship for an Observatory who have a key role in a particular research field. This can be research institutes, groups at universities, libraries but in some cases also research projects or other initiatives having a pivotal role in a certain community.
A possible approach to get an observatory started might be to think about research questions your discipline wants to answer and how the answers can be obtained (e.g. with wich methods, materials, etc.) and where the relevant knowledge is found in existing literature. From that, a comparison can be created by adding a few papers addressing the research question by describing their contributions using a fixed set of properties (e.g. ORKG templates).
An Observatory should cover the key research questions in the respective field, so it should not be too large for the start. You should plan to be able to regularly update the Observatory content if new contributions in the respective field are published.
This of course highly depends on the kind of tasks that the Observatory aims at. We estimate that a few hours weekly might be sufficient for devising an attractive observatory. This will probably also well align with your research work. For example, you can create a comparison for describing the related work for each of the papers you publish and you can of course also involve several team members (such as PhD students and PostDocs).
As an observatory organizer you contribute to address a major issue of research by better organizing the research contributions in your field. In addition, you enjoy a number of benefits:
We are currently developing a knowledge extraction pipeline for domain-specific extraction tasks. Feel free to contact us for testing the pipeline with your use case.