Enabling text search on SPARQL endpoints through OSCAR

Here we compare these aforementioned tools with OSCAR. The comparison is based on a set of relevant features common to SPARQL-based searching engines. The chosen features are based on our personal observations of the related tools and of OSCAR usage. Table 1 lists the selected features and provides a brief description of each one.

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Fig. 1.

Comparison table for SPARQL-based searching tools. The first column lists the features used to compare the tools presented individually in each following column. The features are: searching options; dataset; pre-processing; post-processing; filtering options; view and edit the SPARQL query; layout; presentation; export data; system requirements; customisability, programming language. The tools are represented in 3 categories: (1) OSCAR, our proposed tool, (2) other ‘unaware-user’ tools: Scholia, Elda and BioCarian, (3) ‘aware-user’ tools: ViziQuer, VSB, NITELIGHT, YASGUI and WDSQ.

Taking into consideration these features, we have built a comparison table, shown in Fig. 1, illustrating how each tool rates for these features. OSCAR is included, although detailed descriptions of all its properties are given later in this paper. The tools having a green background indicate the ‘unaware-user’ tools: applications that let users query the dataset without explicit knowledge of the SPARQL query, using instead simple textual values as input. The tools with yellow background indicate the ‘aware-user’ tools: applications that let users edit a shown SPARQL query directly, in some cases with the assistance of visual constructs and graphical instruments provided by the tool.

From the data presented in Fig. 1, we notice that ELDA is the closest tool to OSCAR. The main difference is regarding the ‘Post operations’. In OSCAR we wanted to let the adopter permit additional customizable actions over the results retrieved from the SPARQL query execution. We achieve this by combining SPARQL with Javascript to build a more powerful mechanism to control the display of the final results generated in response to the SPARQL query. On the other hand, ELDA upstages OSCAR in supporting the customization of the SPARQL query and presenting query execution statistics.

When looking at the ‘Layout’ feature, we can see that Scholia is the one that offers the greatest number of graphical presentations, these visual representations being generated by the integration of the WDQS components. While the main purpose of OSCAR is for searching a triplestore and presenting a list of the items matching the search criteria, the additional activity of browsing the resources is the function of a separate additional application we have created, called LUCINDA. LUCINDA16

From the listed tools, there are only three (including OSCAR) which can be customized and redefined according to personal needs. Of these, only OSCAR and ELDA provide a customizable configuration for the generated GUI.

Of those ‘aware-user’ tools (with yellow background), where the user acts explicitly on the SPARQL queries, few permit any pre/post query operations. The common approach is to work directly on the SPARQL query, by helping users build queries that satisfy their needs, without additional post-processing. The fact that they don’t have any pre-processing operation is due to the fact that users have full control of the values inserted inside the SPARQL queries.

All the functionalities implemented by OSCAR are executed in the browser (client side), so as to make it easily reusable in different contexts and with different Web sites without the need of handling specific programming languages for running the back-end scripts. In particular, each OSCAR instance is defined by three files:

All these files need first to be imported into an HTML page that will provide the user with the OSCAR text query interface. In addition, a skeleton HTML snippet needs to be included in such a Web page, that will be populated with the result of the OSCAR search operation. This snippet is defined as follows:

The skeleton layout of the aforementioned OSCAR results interface (element div with attribute @id = search) is composed of three main sections, defined by specific div elements: the section extra (@id = search_extra), the section header (@id = search_header), and the section body (@id = search_body).

The section extra can be used to make available additional functionalities and operations to the results of a search operation. Currently, it includes a mechanism for exporting the results shown as a CSV file. The section header contains components that allow one to modify the table of results from a visual perspective – e.g. by specifying the maximum number of rows to be visualized per page, and by sorting the results according to a specific column or field. Finally, the section body is where the results are actually shown. It contains a table populated with the results obtained from the query execution, and a series of filters that enable a user to refine the results, so as to retain or exclude specific values.

The organisation of the structure of the aforementioned sections (and of all the subsections they contain) can be customized according to particular needs. In particular, one can decide which components are to be included within or excluded from the results Web page by keeping within that Web page the relevant HTML fragment, or by omitting it. Furthermore, while OSCAR provides a set of basic layout rules for all the components, these can be freely customised so as to align them with the particular style required by the Web site under consideration.

3.2. The workflow

The workflow implemented by OSCAR is described in Fig. 2, where we introduce all the operations that OSCAR enables, and the various steps it runs as consequences of such operations. The process starts with the generation of the search interface, which is the mechanism used to permit someone to decide between two searching options: either (1) to input a simple free textual query within the text search box provided by the interface, or (2) to perform an advanced search using multiple field queries, connecting them by means of the “AND”, “OR”, and “AND NOT” logical operations. This results in two different workflows, according to the searching choice made by the user.

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Fig. 2.

The workflow implemented by OSCAR (in blue, at the top) and the set of operations that a user can perform by using the search interface and the results interface (in yellow, below). The bold elements are the new extensions added in Version 2.0 as a result of the feedback gathered during the usability testing session described in the SAVE-SD 2018 workshop [6]. The red arrows define the specific workflow of the advanced search. Each operation is connected to the particular step within the workflow that will be executed as a consequence of that operation. The set of operations are possible only after precise steps in the workflow (the dashed lines specify these steps). After the execution of an operation, the workflow execution will move to the next linked step.

In case of a free text search, when a query is run (by pressing the enter key or by clicking on the lens provided in the interface to the right of the free-text field), OSCAR determines which SPARQL query it has to execute in order to provide results to match the particular textual input specified. As described in more detail in Section 3.3, the configuration file allows one to specify a sequence of rules, each defining a SPARQL query and a particular regular expression. OSCAR iterates each rule as it appears in the sequence, and it runs the related SPARQL query with the application of a number of heuristics (defined in the configuration file) only if the input text matches the regular expression specified in the rule under consideration. If no results are returned by that particular SPARQL query, OSCAR iterates to the next rule and its associated SPARQL query until a result is returned, or until no result is found.

On the other hand, if a user chooses to run an advanced search, the workflow will directly start from the application of the heuristics and the execution of a complex SPARQL query, which is made through the combination of several SPARQL group patterns combined through the appropriate connectors (e.g. “UNION” and “FILTER NOT EXISTS”) according to the logical connectors chosen by the user from the Web interface. Once we have a set of results returned by the SPARQL query, we move directly to the post-processing phase. This workflow is shown by means of red arrows in Fig. 2.

Once a result is returned, additional operations are executed. First, OSCAR checks if some of the fields returned in the result table actually represent URL links for values of other fields – according to what is specified in the configuration file – and, if that is the case, it creates explicit links in the resulting Web page. For instance, if we consider a simple two-column table where each row describes the title of an article and the URL from which one can retrieve its full metadata, OSCAR can be configured to show the article title as a clickable link that allows one to go to the descriptive page for that article, by incorporating into the title the related URL that would otherwise have been displayed in the second column.

Then, OSCAR performs two new operations we have built for Version 2.0 if they are activated in the configuration file. First, it calls external services using as parameters the values present in the table returned by the SPARQL query, so as to integrate and/or extend the current table of results with additional information (e.g. a new column). For instance, considering the metadata describing a particular bibliographic resource (such as those available in the OpenCitations Corpus), it is possible to call the Crossref API18

After these passages, OSCAR performs a grouping operation following the parameters indicated in the configuration file. This kind of operation allows one to group multiple rows of the results table according to a particular field (a key). All the fields of such rows will be collected together, for example by concatenating their textual values. For instance, consider the following query to be executed on the OpenCitations Corpus SPARQL endpoint:

This query will return a three column table which includes the title of a bibliographic resource, its IRI, and the name of the author. Where a certain bibliographic resource has multiple authors, multiple rows will be returned (one for each author of the article), each repeating the title and IRI of the bibliographic resource and listing one of its authors in the third field. The grouping operation performed by OSCAR groups all of these authors into one “author” cell in the third column, so as to provide just one row per bibliographic resource in the result table.

Finally, OSCAR allows one to specify just a specific subset of the fields returned by the SPARQL endpoint to display in the Web page, according to the specification given within the configuration file. For instance, using the same example provided above, in this phase we can exclude the second column depicting the IRI of the bibliographic resource since this IRI could have already been incorporated into a clickable link added to the article title in the first column.

All the data obtained by the aforementioned operations are initialized and stored internally in four different forms, called native data, filtered data, sorted data and visualised data respectively. Native data are the complete original result-set after the execution of the aforementioned search operations. Filtered data are the subset of the native data after the application of filtering operations executed by a user through the OSCAR web interface (e.g. “show only the articles published in 2016”). Sorted data are the subset of the filtered data after the execution (still by the user, through the Web interface) of sorting operations (e.g. “sort the rows in descending order according to the number of citations that the bibliographic resources have received”). Finally, visualised data are the subset of the sorted data that are displayed in the Web page (for example, the first twenty results), while the others are hidden behind a pagination mechanism so as to avoid filling up the entire page with all the results.

It is worth mentioning that, in the initialization phase, before filtering and sorting, all the filtered data and sorted data are equivalent to the native data, while the visualised data (i.e. those actually shown in the webpage) are a subset of the sorted data initially created using the display parameters specified in the configuration file. The filtered and sorted data are then subsequently modified as a consequence of the filtering and sorting operations undertaken by a user through the OSCAR Web interface. In fact, once all the various data are initialised, OSCAR builds its layout and interface, and thus enables the user to interact with the results by executing certain types of operation on the data – i.e. exporting, filtering, sorting and visualising – introduced above. All the aforementioned operations, with the exception of the exporting operation, result in updating the user interface, which shows only the new subset of visualised data obtained as a consequence of each operation, as summarized in Table 2.

OSCAR offers a flexible way to customise its behaviour according to different needs. In particular, an adopter has to modify a particular configuration file (i.e. search-conf.js, which contains a JSON object) so as to customize the tool for the particular SPARQL endpoint to be queried – as illustrated in the documentation of the tool available on the GitHub repository.19

This configuration file allows one to specify the SPARQL endpoint against which the SPARQL queries are to be run, and the SPARQL prefixes to use in the various queries. In addition, it enables the specification of the rules for executing the appropriate SPARQL queries. In particular, each rule includes a name, an activator (i.e. a regular expression shaping a particular string pattern), a category describing the types of data that will be collected (see below), and the SPARQL query to include into the macro query, defined under the specified category, in order to build the correct sequence of SPARQL group patterns to execute once the activator matches with the textual input query provided by the user. In the case of an advanced search, we might have multiple queries from several rules which need to be connected, following the logical connectors specified in the user interface (“AND”, “OR”, and “AND NOT”), with the corresponding SPARQL constructs. These segments are then moved inside the extended macro query defined under the corresponding category of the rule. A specific boolean flag can determine whether a specific rule should be taken into consideration for the free-text and/or the advanced search. The pre-processing functions (key “heuristics”) are also defined in the ‘rule’ block. They are listed in the order they must be called, and the result returned by the first will be used as the input for the second, and so on.

Finally, the configuration file also comprises the categories, i.e. particular descriptive operations that are applied to the results returned by the built SPARQL query defined inside them, after the combination of the queries for the selected rules. Each category includes a name and a set of SPARQL query SELECT variables. Each of these variables is accompanied by information about its presentation mechanisms (e.g. the label to use for presenting it in the Web page, and the width of the table column in which to put the related values), and about other filtering operations that can be applied to the values associated with that variable (e.g. the operations link, group and select described in Section 3.2).

4.1. The OpenCitations Corpus

The OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) is an open repository of scholarly citation data and bibliographic information that we have developed. Originally this database was the main target and incentive for the development of OSCAR. Currently, the OCC contains 14 million citation links between more than 7 million bibliographic resources.

The OSCAR search interface for the OCC is available at http://opencitations.net/search. The use of OSCAR, in this case, enables the search of two entities included in the OCC: documents (bibliographic resources) and authors.

We have now configured OSCAR for both the free-textual and advanced search. In particular:

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Fig. 3.

The Results interface of OSCAR for the OCC: the results shown are those obtained after the application of a free-text search using the string ‘machine learning’ (http://opencitations.net/search?text=machine+learning). Each row represents a bibliographic resource, while the fields represent (from left to right): the resource identifier in the OpenCitations Corpus (Corpus ID), the year of publication (Year), the title (Title), the list of authors (Authors), and how many times the bibliographic resource has been cited by other resources according to the data available in the OCC (Cited by).

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Fig. 4.

The advanced search interface for the OCC. In this example we are looking for all the documents containing either the words ‘semantic’ or ‘open citations’ in their title/subtitle, and having one of the authors with last name ‘shotton’ – http://opencitations.net/search?text=shotton&rule=author_text&bc_1=and&text=semantic&rule=any_text&bc_2=or&text=shotton&rule=author_text&bc_3=and&text=open+citations&rule=any_text.

The configuration file of this instance of OSCAR is available online at http://opencitations.net/static/js/search-conf.js.

COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI references, is an RDF dataset containing details of all the citations that are specified by the open references to DOI-identified works present in Crossref. These citations are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including the citation timespan, modelled according to the data model described in the Open Citation model webpage.21

For searching COCI, we have configured OSCAR to be used only through an advanced search interface, which is currently available at http://opencitations.net/index/coci/search. Users will have three possible searching parameters available to be combined: the value of the citing DOI, the value of the cited DOI, the Open Citation Identifier (OCI) of the citation. These fields may be combined and connected in a complex query using the usual logical connectors. Figure 5 shows the result interface of OSCAR after searching for the value ‘10.1186/1756-8722-6-59’ as citing DOI in COCI. In this case, the values within the fields “Citing references” and “Cited references” are provided by querying the Crossref REST API with the DOI of the citing and cited entities.

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Fig. 5.

The results interface for COCI in the OpenCitations OSCAR website after using its advanced search option and executing a query to look for all the resources (citation entities) having the value ‘10.1186/1756-8722-6-59’ as citing DOI – http://opencitations.net/index/coci/search?text=10.1186%2F1756-8722-6-59&rule=citingdoi.

The configuration file of this instance of OSCAR is available online at http://opencitations.net/static/js/search-conf-coci.js.

Wikidata is a free open knowledge base which acts as a central store for the structured data of Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia, and of other sites and services. Wikidata offers a SPARQL query service and already has its own powerful Web graphical user interface for facilitating the users to construct SPARQL queries. Our OSCAR customisation to the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint is thus made entirely for demonstration purposes, rather than to provide new functionality for Wikidata users. While Wikidata contains a wide variety of information, we decided to limit our customisation of OSCAR to bibliographic entities within the scholarly domain.

We have consulted previous articles which talk about how to query the Wikidata dataset [9], and the actual data model used by Wikidata [3]. Based on this information, we have built an entirely new OSCAR interface dedicated to Wikidata querying, available at the following link https://opencitations.github.io/oscar/example/v2/wikidata.html. This interface has been also recently presented at the WikiCite 2018 conference in Berkeley, California [7].

The OSCAR configuration for Wikidata includes both the free-text and the advanced search options. Users can decide whether they want to search for scholarly documents or their authors. In the case of scholarly documents, users can retrieve them by typing: (1) a DOI, (2) the name of the journal where such document has been published, (3) the cited articles, (4) the articles referenced, (5) the earliest publication year, (6) the Wikidata QID, or (7) a free textual input. All these options can be combined to build a complex query through the advanced searching option. For instance, in Fig. 6 the advanced query built asks to retrieve all the articles citing the scholarly document with DOI “10.1145/2362499.2362502”, where the citing articles have been published in the “Journal of Documentation”.

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Fig. 6.

The OSCAR interface for querying the Wikidata scholarly documents. On the top right of the page we have an input box for free-text search, while on the bottom we have a section dedicated to advanced search. The constructed query retrieves all the articlesciting “10.1145/2362499.2362502” published in “Journal of Documentation”.

Where the required results concern authors rather than publications, users can retrieve results by typing: (1) the ORCID, (2) a DOI of a specific work, (3) the job or profession of the author, (4) the last name, or (5) the first name. As for queries concerning publications, users can also decide to build a complex query and combine these options using the “AND” / “OR” / “AND NOT” logical connectors.

The current demo available online already presents a set of query examples to try. In Fig. 7 we demonstrate the way OSCAR shows the results retrieved after asking for the list of articles citing the scholarly article with DOI “10.1016/J.WEBSEM.2012.08.001”, with a publication year no earlier than 2015.

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Fig. 7.

The results interface of OSCAR for Wikidata after using its advanced search, after asking OSCAR to retrieve the list of articles citing 10.1016/J.WEBSEM.2012.08.001, where the citing publications have a publication year of 2015 or later. Each row represents a publication, while the fields represent (from left to right): the resource identifier in Wikidata (Q-ID), the title (Work title), the list of authors (Authors), the number of citations (Cited), and the year of publication (Date).

The configuration file of this instance of OSCAR is available online at https://opencitations.github.io/oscar/example/v2/static/js/search-conf-wikidata.js.

5.1. General usage

We gathered the statistics regarding the accesses to OSCAR through the OpenCitations website on both the OCC and COCI datasets maintained by OpenCitations. In Fig. 8 the graph shows the number of queries launched for each different dataset, from February 2018 (the date when OSCAR was launched and integrated inside the OpenCitations website) to September 2018. In addition to the total number of accesses, the graph shows the number of queries that led to further navigation to browse one or more of the resources that had been found and listed in the results table (OCC-browse, COCI-browse). In particular, this navigation starts by clicking on the contents of the results table, so as to access the metadata related to that particular entity (e.g. a document or an author). The resources are browsed using another tool called LUCINDA, which is a separate tool made available by OpenCitations to provide an HTML presentation of the data of a particular entity included the OpenCitations datasets. The description of LUCINDA goes beyond the scope of this paper – for further details we recommend visiting the repository and documentation of LUCINDA at https://github.com/opencitations/lucinda.

From Fig. 8 we can notice a peak in the usage of OSCAR for OCC during March 2018 (the month after its launch) and June 2018. The latter peak is probably due to the integration of LUCINDA in the website, enabling the searched items to be browsed and visualized. We can see a high number of accesses that led to a redirection from OSCAR to the LUCINDA resource browser page. In the COCI case, the peak point happened in July 2018, i.e. the month after its official release.

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Fig. 8.

The number of queries launched through OSCAR from the OpenCitations web site, searching for OCC or COCI resources, for each different month starting from February 2018 to September 2018. For each dataset we show the number of queries that led to subsequent LUCINDA browsing of the metadata returned by the OSCAR search. Note that the vertical axis uses a logarithmic scale.

We wanted also to monitor the usage of the new advanced search feature added to OSCAR Version 2.0, and its ability to build complex queries with multiple restrictions by means of logical connectors. From Fig. 9 we can notice that this new feature is still not so popular among the users searching the OpenCitations datasets. This statistic is significant and might suggest the need to make further analysis of the usability of the advanced search and how we could improve it, to encourage users using it.

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Fig. 9.

The number of complex queries (with logical connectors) launched through OSCAR from the OpenCitations web site, searching for COCI or OCC resources, for each different month starting from February 2018 to September 2018.

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Fig. 10.

The number of queries launched through OSCAR from the OpenCitations web site, searching for author or document resources inside the OCC corpus, for each different month starting from February 2018 to September 2018.

In this section, we wanted to answer the question ‘what type of queries users do?’. We made two different analysis for the OCC and the COCI case.

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Fig. 11.

The number of queries launched through OSCAR from the OpenCitations web site, searching inside the COCI dataset, for each different month starting from April 2018 to September 2018. The results show the number of searches per month for a citing entity by specifying its DOI (blue), for a cited entity by specifying its DOI (orange), and for a citation itself by specifying its open citation identifier (OCI),23 the globally unique persistent identifier for a bibliographic citation.

In the case of the OCC dataset, we wanted to see which are the categories mostly searched by users among documents and authors. Figure 10 shows these queries for each month starting from March to September 2018. No values are reported for February 2018, due to the fact that the first version of OSCAR did not have any feature to distinguish between an author query or a document query since the input accepted was only free-text without any category attribution to it. The results show that users search for documents more frequently than they do for authors. However, since the results returned for a document query includes the authors’ names, which could be further browsed, it may be that users search for authors indirectly by first looking up one of their works.

In the OSCAR instance for COCI, we have just one possible category, since the only type of resources included in the dataset are citations. Therefore, we made an analysis on the type of queries that users specified, among the three possible queries that can be made to retrieve information from COCI: (1) a query for a citing bibliographic resource, made by specifying its DOI, (2) a query for a cited bibliographic resource, made by specifying its DOI, or (3) a query for a citation, made by specifying its Open Citation Identifier (OCI),22