Exploiting interlinked research metadata

OpenAIRE, the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, aggregates metadata about research (projects, publications, people, organizations, etc.) into a central Information Space. OpenAIRE aims at increasing interoperability and reusability of this data collection by exposing it as Linked Open Data (LOD). By following the LOD principles, it is now possible to further increase interoperability and reusability by connecting the OpenAIRE LOD to other datasets about projects, publications, people and organizations. Doing so required us to identify link discovery tools that perform well, as well as candidate datasets that provide comprehensive scholarly communication metadata, and then to specify linking rules. We demonstrate the added value that interlinking provides for end users by implementing visual frontends for looking up publications to cite, and publication statistics, and evaluating their usability on top of interlinked vs. non-interlinked data.