ricgraph_newsletter_june_2025 – Documentation Ricgraph

Keywords

Research in context graph, Ricgraph, Ricgraph Explorer, Ricgraph REST API, Data enrichment, Data harvesting, Data linking, Enrichment, Graph, Graph database, Harvest, Harvest data, Harvester, Knowledge graph, Linked data, Metadata, Utrecht University, Visualization

Subject: Ricgraph newsletter June 2025

Sent: Wednesday, 11 June 2024 14:17

Dear colleague,

This newsletter tells you about some recent developments around Ricgraph. If you would like to have a presentation or demo, or would like to discuss how Ricgraph can help you for your specific use case, please do not hesitate to contact me. Please feel free to share this newsletter with anyone you might think is interested.

What is Ricgraph

Ricgraph (www.ricgraph.eu), also known as Research in context graph, enables the exploration of researchers, teams, their results, collaborations, skills, projects, and the relations between these items.

Ricgraph can store many types of items into a single graph. These items can be obtained from various systems and from multiple organizations. Ricgraph facilitates reasoning about these items because it infers new relations between items, relations that are not present in any of the separate source systems. Ricgraph is flexible and extensible, and can be adapted to new application areas.

Pilot project Open Ricgraph demo server starts in September

In September, we will start a pilot project Open Ricgraph demo server. It aims to demonstrate how a knowledge graph can provide insights into research relations and collaborations, and how it can optimize the quality of research information. This demo server will be accessible to anyone. We will focus on:

Pilot A: Participating organizations can enrich Pure data using Ricgraph and BackToPure. BackToPure can insert (enrich) items from an organization that are absent from the Pure of that organization but are present in another source, back into the Pure of that organization.
Pilot B: Participating organizations can explore collaborations between sub-organizations (faculties, departments, chairs) using Ricgraph.

To read more: Discovering insights from cross-organizational research information and collaborations: A pilot project using Ricgraph, Rik D.T. Janssen (2025), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15637647. The Open Ricgraph demo server will contain research information from Delft University of Technology (thanks for making this possible!). It can also contain research information of your organization! To learn what is necessary to accomplish this, read sections 1.6 and 1.7, and contact me.

BackToPure to enhance an organization’s Pure

BackToPure is a tool designed to enhance an organization’s Research Information System Pure by enriching its content. We use it in Pilot A above. BackToPure can identify items (such as publications, data sets or software) that exist in other external sources but are missing from the organization’s Pure, and then insert (enrich) those items into Pure. The result is a more complete overview of research at that organization. Status: experimental stage (beta).

Chatbot to chat about research information

A chatbot that allows you to “talk” to Ricgraph. You can formulate questions in plain English, such as “Please give me the research results of the Geosciences faculty of Utrecht University?” or “With what organizations does that faculty collaborate?”. It uses a local Large Language Model. Status: planning stage (pre-alpha).

Ricgraph extended with topics

A project that uses AI and Large Language Models to cluster and visualize large amounts of research information. It assigns topics to publications, data sets, and software. By selecting a number of topics, research results are grouped, and possibly experts on these topics can be found. Status: planning stage (pre-alpha).

Exploring collaborations between (sub-)organizations of different universities

Since the research information system Pure contains a full organization tree, and these are inserted in Ricgraph, it is possible to find collaborations between organizations, not only on a top level (i.e., an institution level), but also on other levels, like faculties, departments, etc. We will explore this in Pilot B above.

As an example, see the enclosed html file (thanks Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Delft University of Techology!) [not available in this newsletter archive]. You will need to open it using your web browser, because it contains JavaScript. If it doesn’t open directly, save it to your computer, right click it, and choose something like “open with your browser”. What you’ll see is a very first attempt to visualize collaborations between UU, VUA, and DUT faculties for journal articles for years 2022-2025. Of course, for each university there are many more journal articles, but this figure is limited to journal articles that were created by authors of two or more facutlies of UU, VUA, and DUT. You can hoover over the lines to get numbers.

Other recent developments

A tool that helps Pure administrators to clean up “external organizations” in Pure. Status: planning stage (pre-alpha).
A documentation website for Ricgraph: https://docs.ricgraph.eu.
You also might want to read the reference publication: Rik D.T. Janssen (2024). Ricgraph: A flexible and extensible graph to explore research in context from various systems. SoftwareX, 26(101736). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2024.101736.
Many other changes. Ricgraph is now on version v2.12. To see a full overview of all changes, go to the releases page: https://github.com/UtrechtUniversity/ricgraph/releases.

If you would like to have a presentation or demo, or would like to discuss how Ricgraph can help you for your specific use case, please do not hesitate to contact me. Please feel free to share this newsletter with anyone you might think is interested.

This newsletter has been sent to you because we have had a previous communication about Ricgraph. Please let me know if you would like to be removed from this list (or if you want to be added to it, if someone forwarded it to you). There will be about 2 to 3 newsletters per year about Ricgraph.

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