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Dr Francesco Osborne

Francesco Osborne

Profile summary

  • Research Staff
  • Research Fellow
  • Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
  • Knowledge Media Institute
  • francesco.osborne

Web links

Professional biography

I am Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media institute of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, where I lead the Scholarly Knowledge Mining (SKM) team. I was previously Research Associate at the same university. 

The SKM team aims at producing innovative approaches leveraging large-scale data mining, semantic technologies, machine learning and visual analytics for making sense of scholarly data and forecast research dynamics. We collaborate with a number of commercial organizations (e.g., Springer Nature, Elsevier, Microsoft, Digital Science, Figshare), non-profit organizations, and universities.

 

Research interests

My research focuses on Artificial Intelligence, Information Extraction, Knowledge Graphs, Science of Science, Semantic Web, Research Analytics, and Semantic Publishing. I have authored more than seventy peer-reviewed publications in top journals and conferences in my areas of research, including the Semantic Web Journal, ISWC, ESWC, WebConf, JCDL, TPDL, UMAP, Data Science, Data Intelligence, and the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. I won the best paper award at SAVE-SD 2018 and the 1st prize at the Semantic Publishing Challenge at ESWC 2014.

I served as co-chair for several high-tier scientific events. I am member of the Editorial Board of the Data Intelligence Journal and in the program committees of all the main conferences relevant to my research (e.g., ISWC, ESWC, WebConf, EKAW). 

 

Impact and engagement

My team has produced several applications that have been adopted by Springer Nature. In particular, our tool for the automatic generation of scholarly metadata, STM, had been used since 2016 by their editorial teams in Germany, China, Brazil, Japan, and India for annotating several book series in Computer Science, including LNCS, LNBIP, CCIS, IFIP-AICT, and LNICST. This solution has halved the time needed for classifying proceedings, changed the editorial workflows, and improved the quality of the metadata. In particular the latter outcome has resulted in a significant increment in the number of downloads by users of the Springer Portal during the last three years (100% increase for volumes annotated by STM vs. 47% increase for other CS volumes). For these reasons, this project has been shortlisted as one of the B11 Impact Cases for the REF 2020 evaluation.

In 2019, we released the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), which is currently the largest taxonomy of research areas in the field. CSO has also been adopted by Springer Nature  and provides the basis for all solutions we developed for them. 

In 2020, we released the Academia/Industry DynAmics (AIDA) Knowledge Graph, an innovative resource for supporting large-scale analyses of research trends across academia and industry.  AIDA describes 14M publications and 8M patents according to the research topics drawn from the Computer Science Ontology, the type of the author's affiliations (e.g., academy, industry, collaborative), and 66 industrial sectors (e.g., automotive, financial, energy, electronics). In the same year we also produced the Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Graph (AI-KG), a large-scale automatically generated knowledge graph that describes 850K entities (e.g., tasks, methods, metrics, materials, others) relevant to AI according to 1,2M statements extracted from 333K articles. AI-KG was designed to support a large variety of intelligent services for analysing and making sense of research dynamics, assisting researchers, and informing decision of founding bodies and research policy makers.

Currently, I am co-ordinating the process of adapting our technologies for use in the Biomedical fields and, in this context, we are contributing to the large scientific effort around COVID-19 by extracting key medical concepts (e.g., symptoms, risk factors) from a large collection of scientific articles.

External collaborations

I collaborate with a number of commercial organizations (e.g., Springer Nature, Elsevier, Microsoft, Digital Science, Figshare), non-profit organizations (e.g., OECD, CSET, FBK), and universities (e.g., Oxford, Cagliari, Trento, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Paris, Bologna, Vienna, and others). I am Visiting Professor at the Paris 13 University.

Publications

The Computer Science Ontology: A Comprehensive Automatically-Generated Taxonomy of Research Areas (2020-07-24)
Salatino, Angelo; Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan; Mannocci, Andrea; Birukou, Aliaksandr; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
Data Intelligence, 2(3) (pp. 379-416)

A decade of Semantic Web research through the lenses of a mixed methods approach (2020)
Kirrane, Sabrina; Sabou, Marta; Fernández, Javier; Osborne, Francesco; Robin, Cécile; Buitelaar, Paul; Motta, Enrico and Polleres, Axel
Semantic Web Journal, 11(6)

Editorial: Special Issue on Scholarly Data Analysis (Semantics, Analytics, Visualisation) (2019-11-25)
Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra; Osborne, Francesco; Peroni, Silvio and Vahdati, Sahar
Data Science, 2(1-2) (pp. 177-179)

The Evolution of IJHCS and CHI: A Quantitative Analysis (2019-11)
Mannocci, Andrea; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 131 (pp. 23-40)

Reducing the effort for systematic reviews in software engineering (2019)
Osborne, Francesco; Muccini, Henry; Lago, Patricia and Motta, Enrico
Data Science, 2(1-2) (pp. 311-340)

Geographical trends in academic conferences: An analysis of authors’ affiliations (2019)
Mannocci, Andrea; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
Data Science, 2(1-2) (pp. 181-203)

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles (2017-10-02)
Peroni, Silvio; Osborne, Francesco; Di Iorio, Angelo; Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni; Poggi, Francesco; Vitali, Fabio and Motta, Enrico
PeerJ Computer Science, 3, Article e132

How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas (2017-06-19)
Salatino, Angelo A.; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
PeerJ Computer Science(3) (e119)

Property-based Semantic Similarity and Relatedness for Improving Recommendation Accuracy and Diversity (2015)
Likavec, Silvia; Osborne, Francesco and Cena, Federica
International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 11(4) (pp. 1-40)

User data discovery and aggregation: the CS-UDD algorithm (2014-06)
Carmagnola, Francesca; Osborne, Francesco and Torre, Ilaria
Information Sciences, 270(20) (pp. 41-72)

Escaping the Big Brother: an empirical study on factors influencing identification and information leakage on the Web (2014-04)
Carmagnola, Francesca; Osborne, Francesco and Torre, Ilaria
Journal of Information Science, 40(2) (pp. 180-197)

Anisotropic propagation of user interests in ontology-based user models (2013-11-20)
Cena, Federica; Likavec, Silvia and Osborne, Francesco
Information Sciences, 250 (pp. 40-60)

Exploring research trends with Rexplore (2013-09)
Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
D-Lib Magazine, 19(9/10)

Ontology Extraction and Usage in the Scholarly Knowledge Domain (2020)
Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In: Cota, Giuseppe; Daquino, Marilena and Pozzato, Gian Luca eds. Applications and Practices in Ontology Design, Extraction, and Reasoning. Studies on the Semantic Web
Publisher : IOS Press

Proceedings of the Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (DL4KG2020) co-located with the 17th Extended Semantic Web Conference 2020 (ESWC 2020) (2020)
Alam, Mehwish; Buscaldi, Davide; Cochez, Michael; Osborne, Francesco; Reforgiato Recupero, Diego and Sack, Harald eds.
CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Publisher : CEUR-WS.org

Special Issue: Scholarly Data Analysis (Semantics, Analytics, Visualisation) (2019-11-25)
Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra; Osborne, Francesco; Peroni, Silvio and Vahdati, Sahar eds.
Data Science
Publisher : IOS Press

Proceedings of the EKAW Doctoral Consortium 2018 co-located with the 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2018), Nancy, France, November 13, 2018. (2019)
Hollink, Laura and Osborne, Francesco eds.
CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Publisher : CEUR

DL4KG2019 - Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (2019)
Alam, Mehwish; Buscaldi, Davide; Cochez, Michael; Osborne, Francesco; Reforgiato Recupero, Diego and Sack, Harald eds.
Publisher : CEUR-WS.org

Semantics, Analytics, Visualization - 3rd International Workshop, SAVE-SD 2017, Perth, Australia, April 3, 2017, and 4th International Workshop, SAVE-SD 2018, Lyon, France, April 24, 2018, Revised Selected Papers. (2018)
González Beltrán, Alejandra; Osborne, Francesco; Peroni, Silvio and Vahdati, Sahar eds.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
ISBN : 978-3-030-01379-0 | Publisher : Springer

Integrating Knowledge Graphs for Analysing Academia and Industry Dynamics (2020)
Angioni, Simone; Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco; Reforgiato Recupero, Diego and Motta, Enrico
In : 1st​ Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Graphs (25 Aug 2020, Lyon, France)

Databases and Information Systems in the AI Era: Contributions from ADBIS, TPDL and EDA 2020 Workshops and Doctoral Consortium (2020)
Bellatreche, Ladjel; Bentayeb, Fadila; Bieliková, Mária; Boussaid, Omar; Catania, Barbara; Ceravolo, Paolo; Demidova, Elena; Halfeld Ferrari, Mirian; Gomez Lopez, Maria Teresa; S. Hara, Carmem; Kordić, Slavica; Luković, Ivan; Mannocci, Andrea; Manghi, Paolo; Osborne, Francesco; Papatheodorou, Christos; Ristić, Sonja; Sacharidis, Dimitris; Romero, Oscar; Salatino, Angelo; Talens, Guilaine; van Keulen, Maurice; Vergoulis, Thanasis and Zumer, Maja
In : ADBIS, TPDL and EDA 2020 (25-27 Aug 2020, Lyon, France) (pp. 3-20)

ResearchFlow: Understanding the Knowledge Flow between Academia and Industry (2020)
Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2020) (16-20 Sep 2020, Bolzano (Italy) (Online)) ((In Press))

AI-KG: an Automatically Generated Knowledge Graph of Artificial Intelligence (2020)
Dessi', Danilo; Osborne, Francesco; Reforgiato Recupero, Diego; Buscaldi, Davide; Motta, Enrico and Sack, Harald
In : International Semantic Web Conference 2020 (2-6 Nov 2020, Online)

The AIDA Dashboard: Analysing Conferences with Semantic Technologies (2020)
Angioni, Simone; Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco; Reforgiato Recupero, Diego and Motta, Enrico
In : 19th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2020) (2-6 Nov 2020, Athens (Greece) - Virtual)

Mining Scholarly Publications for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction (2019)
Buscaldi, Davide; Dessì, Danilo; Motta, Enrico; Osborne, Francesco and Reforgiato Recupero, Diego
In : Extended Semantic Web Conference 2019 (2-6 Jun, Portoroz, Slovenia)

Mining Scholarly Data for Fine-Grained Knowledge Graph Construction (2019)
Buscaldi, Davide; Dessì, Danilo; Motta, Enrico; Osborne, Francesco and Reforgiato Recupero, Diego
In : Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (DL4KG2019) (2 Jun 2019, Portoroz, Slovenia) (pp. 21-30)

The CSO Classifier: Ontology-Driven Detection of Research Topics in Scholarly Articles (2019)
Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco; Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan and Motta, Enrico
In : TPDL 2019: 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (9-12 Sep 2019, Oslo, Norway)

Improving Editorial Workflow and Metadata Quality at Springer Nature (2019)
Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco; Birukou, Aliaksandr and Motta, Enrico
In : The 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019) (26-30 Oct 2019, Auckland, New Zealand) ((In Press))

Smart Topics Miner 2: Improving Proceedings Retrievability at Springer Nature (2019)
Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco; Birukou, Aliaksandr and Motta, Enrico
In : 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019): Posters & Demonstrations, Industry and Outrageous Ideas Tracks (26-30 Oct 2019, Auckland, New Zeeland) ((In Press))

Integrating Knowledge Graphs for Comparing the Scientific Output of Academia and Industry (2019)
Angioni, Simone; Osborne, Francesco; Salatino, Angelo; Reforgiato Recupero, Diego and Motta, Enrico
In : 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019): Posters & Demonstrations, Industry and Outrageous Ideas Tracks (26-30 Oct 2019, Auckland, New Zeeland) ((In Press))

Geographical trends in research: a preliminary analysis on authors' affiliations (2018-10-31)
Mannocci, Andrea; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : 4th International Workshop, SAVE-SD 2018 (23-27 Apr 2018, Lyon) (pp. 61-77)

Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products (2018-10-28)
Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan; Osborne, Francesco; Birukou, Aliaksandr and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2018 (8-12 Oct 2018, Monterey, California, United States) (pp. 341-358)

Classifying Research Papers with the Computer Science Ontology (2018-10-09)
Salatino, Angelo; Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan; Mannocci, Andrea; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference 2018 (8-12 Oct 2018, Monterey, CA (USA))

The Smart Book Recommender: An Ontology-Driven Application for Recommending Editorial Products (2018-10-08)
Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan; Osborne, Francesco; Birukou, Aliaksandr and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2018 (08-12 Oct 2018, Monterey, California, United States)

The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas (2018-10)
Salatino, Angelo A.; Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan; Mannocci, Andrea; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference 2018 (8-12 Oct 2018, Monterey, California, USA) (pp. 187-205)

Sustainability in Software Engineering (2018-06-14)
Wolfram, Nina; Lago, Patricia and Osborne, Francesco
In : SustainIT 2017 (6-7 Dec 2017, Funchal, Portugal)

AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics (2018-05-23)
Salatino, Angelo A.; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : JCDL ’18: The 18th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (3-7 Jun 2018, Fort Worth, TX, USA) (pp. 303-312)

Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance (2018)
Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : 17th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2018 (8-12 Oct 2018, Monterey, CA, USA) (pp. 495-512)

Forecasting the Spreading of Technologies in Research Communities (2017-12-04)
Osborne, Francesco; Mannocci, Andrea and Motta, Enrico
In : Ninth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2017) (4-6 Dec 2017, Austin, Texas, United States)

Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies (2017)
Osborne, Francesco; Salatino, Angelo; Birukou, Aliaksandr; Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2017 (21-25 Oct 2017, Vienna, Austria)

Forecasting Technology Migrations by means of the Technology-Topic Framework (2017)
Osborne, Francesco; Mannocci, Andrea and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2017 (21-25 Oct 2017, Vienna, Austria)

Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products (2017)
Osborne, Francesco; Thanapalasingam, Thiviyan; Salatino, Angelo; Birukou, Aliaksandr and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2017 (21-25 Oct 2017, Vienna, Austria)

2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery (2017)
Mannocci, Andrea; Salatino, Angelo A.; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : Recoding Black Mirror @ ISWC '17 (21-25 Oct 2017, Wien, Austria)

SAVE-SD 2017: Third Workshop on Semantics, Analytics and Visualisation: Enhancing Scholarly Data (2017)
Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra; Osborne, Francesco; Peroni, Silvio and Vahdati, Sahar
In : WWW '17 Companion - Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (3-7 Apr 2017, Perth, Australia)

Combining NLP and Semantics for Mining Software Technologies from Research Publications (2016-04-11)
de Ribaupierre, Hélène; Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : World Wide Web Conference 2016 (11 Apr 2016, Montreal, Canada) (pp. 23-24)

It ROCS! The RASH Online Conversion Service (2016-04-11)
Di Iorio, Angelo; Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra; Osborne, Francesco; Peroni, Silvio; Poggi, Francesco and Vitali, Fabio
In : World Wide Web Conference 2016 (11 Apr 2016, Montreal, Canada) (pp. 25-26)

Automatic Classification of Springer Nature Proceedings with Smart Topic Miner (2016)
Osborne, Francesco; Salatino, Angelo; Birukou, Aliaksandr and Motta, Enrico
In : The 15th International Semantic Web Conference (17-21 Oct 2016, Kobe, Japan)

Smart Topic Miner: Supporting Springer Nature Editors with Semantic Web Technologies (2016)
Osborne, Francesco; Salatino, Angelo; Birukou, Aliaksandr and Motta, Enrico
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2016) (17-21 Oct 2016, Kobe, Japan)

Ontology Forecasting in Scientific Literature: Semantic Concepts Prediction based on Innovation-Adoption Priors (2016)
Cano Basave, Amparo; Osborne, Francesco and Salatino, Angelo
In : 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2016) (19-23 Nov 2016, Bologna, Italy (forthcoming)) (pp. 51-67)

Ontology Forecasting in Scientific Literature: Semantic Concepts Prediction based on Innovation-Adoption Priors (2016)
Cano Basave, Amparo; Osborne, Francesco and Salatino, Angelo
In : 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2016) (19-23 Nov 2016, Bologna, Italy)

TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications (2016)
Osborne, Francesco; de Ribaupierre, Helene and Motta, Enrico
In : 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2016) (19-23 Nov 2016, Bologna, Italy)

Klink-2: integrating multiple web sources to generate semantic topic networks (2015-10-30)
Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : 14th International Semantic Web Conference 2015 (11-15 Oct 2015, Bethlehem, PA) (pp. 408-424)

The RASH Framework: enabling HTML+RDF submissions in scholarly venues (2015-10-11)
Di Iorio, Angelo; Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni; Osborne, Francesco; Peroni, Silvio; Poggi, Francesco; Smith, Michael; Vitali, Fabio and Zhao, Jun
In : 14th International Semantic Web Conferences (ISWC 2015) (11-15 Oct 2015, Bethlehem, PA)

Identifying diachronic topic-based research communities by clustering shared research trajectories (2014)
Osborne, Francesco; Scavo, Beppe and Motta, Enrico
In : Extended Semantic Web Conference 2014 (ESWC 2014) - Research Track (26-30 May 2014, Montpellier, France)

Understanding research dynamics (2014)
Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : 11th ESWC 2014 (25-29 May 2014, Limenas Hersonissou, Crete)

Clustering citation distributions for semantic categorization and citation prediction (2014)
Osborne, Francesco; Peroni, Silvio and Motta, Enrico
In : I4th Workshop on Linked Science 2014— Making Sense Out of Data (LISC2014) (19-23 Oct 2014, Riva Del Garda, Trentino, Italy (Forthcoming))

Rexplore: unveiling the dynamics of scholarly data (2014)
Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : Digital Libraries 2014 (8-12 Sep 2014, London, UK)

A hybrid semantic approach to building dynamic maps of research communities (2014)
Osborne, Francesco; Scavo, Giuseppe and Motta, Enrico
In : EKAW 2014 (24-28 Nov 2014, Linköping, Sweden) (pp. 356-372)

Inferring semantic relations by user feedback (2014)
Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : EKAW 2014 (24-28 Nov 2014, Linköping, Sweden) (pp. 339-255)

TellEat: sharing experiences on the move (2014)
Chiabrando, Elisa; Furnari, Roberto; Likavec, Silvia; Osborne, Francesco; Picardi, Claudia and Dupré, Daniele Theseider
In : 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: HCI International 2014 Conference (22-27 Jun 2014, Heraklion, Crete, Greece) (pp. 377-388)

Exploring scholarly data with Rexplore. (2013)
Osborne, Francesco; Motta, Enrico and Mulholland, Paul
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2013) (21-25 Oct 2013, Sydney, Australia) (pp. 460-477)

Granular semantic user similarity in the presence of sparse data (2013)
Osborne, Francesco; Likavec, Silvia and Cena, Federica
In : AI*IA 2013: XIII Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (4-6 Dec 2013, Turin, Italy) (pp. 385-396)

Mining semantic relations between research areas (2012)
Osborne, Francesco and Motta, Enrico
In : 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012) (11-15 Nov 2012, Boston, MA, USA) (pp. 410-426)

Making sense of research with Rexplore (2012)
Motta, Enrico and Osborne, Francesco
In : International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012) (11-15 Nov 2012, Boston, USA)

Property-based interest propagation in ontology-based user model (2012)
Cena, Frederica; Likavec, Silvia and Osborne, Francesco
In : 20th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization-UMAP 2012 (16-20 Jul 2012, Montreal, Canada) (pp. 38-50)

Propagating user interests in ontology-based user model (2011)
Cena, Federica; Likavec, Silvia and Osborne, Francesco
In : AI*IA 2011: XIIth Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence "Artificial Intelligence Around Man and Beyond" (15-17 Sep 2011, Palermo, Italy) (pp. 299-311)

A new approach to social behavior simulation: the mask model (2011)
Osborne, Francesco
In : Fourth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2011) (28 Nov - 01 Dec 2011, Vancouver, Canada) (pp. 97-108)

User data distributed on the social web: how to identify users on different social systems and collecting data about them (2010)
Carmagnola, Francesca; Osborne, Francesco and Torre, Ilaria
In : International Workshop on Information Heterogeneity and Fusion in Recommender Systems (HetRec 2010) (26 Sep 2010, Barcelona, Spain) (pp. 9-15)