Covid-on-the-Web: Exploring the COVID-19 scientific literature through visualization of linked data from entity and argument mining

Abstract

Abstract The unprecedented mobilization of scientists caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has generated an enormous number of scholarly articles that are impossible for a human being to keep track of and explore without appropriate tool support. In this context, we created the Covid-on-the-Web project, which aims to assist the accessing, querying, and sense-making of COVID-19-related literature by combining efforts from the semantic web, natural language processing, and visualization fields. In particular, in this paper we present an RDF data set (a linked version of the “COVID-19 Open Research Dataset” (CORD-19), enriched via entity linking and argument mining) and the “Linked Data Visualizer” (LDViz), which assists the querying and visual exploration of the referred data set. The LDViz tool assists in the exploration of different views of the data by combining a querying management interface, which enables the definition of meaningful subsets of data through SPARQL queries, and a visualization interface based on a set of six visualization techniques integrated in a chained visualization concept, which also supports the tracking of provenance information. We demonstrate the potential of our approach to assist biomedical researchers in solving domain-related tasks, as well as to perform exploratory analyses through use case scenarios.