Venice and the OpenCitations Corpus

An analogy between the city of Venice and the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), extracted from :

Imagine that we are trying to create the bustling city of Venice – the city of scholarly communication – from a collection of islands that represent individual scholarly publications. Citations are the bridges that enable people to pass from one island (e.g. a conference paper) to others (e.g. journal articles and book chapters). At present, while local travel to the next island is permitted, unrestricted travel over the entire network of bridges requires an expensive season ticket, affordable only by rich professionals. The general populace is excluded, and as a consequence the social and commercial growth of the city is stunted. In contrast, were the bridges to be opened without fee to the general populace, people would be able to travel freely through the whole city of scholarly knowledge, and the community would thrive.

The OCC is an attempt to provide these open bridges. Computers operating over the open machine-readable citation data within the OCC will enable us to build a flourishing Venice of knowledge services from the complex archipelago of separate publication islands, adding value and creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Venice and the OpenCitations Corpus

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