Keynote speaker

Michele is Vice President of Data Products at Digital Science, a leading provider of software solutions for the global research ecosystem. His work focuses on developing innovative data infrastructures and tools for research assessment, discovery, and strategic insight - drawing on rich, interlinked information from publications, patents, grants, clinical trials, and other research outputs indexed in Dimensions and Altmetric.

Prior to joining Digital Science, Michele led several key projects at Springer Nature, including SN SciGraph, Nature.com subject pages, and the Nature Ontologies portal. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University (UK), and a degree in logic and philosophy of language from the University of Venice (Italy). Following his doctorate, Michele was a research associate at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where he worked on digital history and digital libraries projects.

Keynote Title:

Performing Research Analytics at Scale: the Dimensions Reporting Platform

Keynote Abstract:

In the evolving landscape of research analytics, access to high-quality, well-structured, and interoperable data is essential for advancing the state of the art in scientometrics, natural scientific language processing (NSLP), and research knowledge graphs. In this keynote, I will introduce Dimensions, one of the world’s largest linked research information platforms, developed by Digital Science. I will outline how Dimensions brings together a uniquely comprehensive dataset—spanning grants, publications, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents—and how this data is structured, enriched, and made available for large-scale scientometric research and NLP experimentation.

Drawing on real-world examples, I will explore how advanced entity extraction and disambiguation techniques underpin many of the classifications within Dimensions, including Fields of Research, Sustainable Development Goals, and disease-specific taxonomies. I will show how Dimensions data can be accessed at scale via BigQuery, enabling researchers to experiment with novel research metrics, such as the disruption index, and build dashboards and applications that support research strategy, evaluation, and discovery.

The talk will also cover the engineering and design decisions that enable us to turn proofs-of-concept into production-scale services, and reflect on the broader implications of such infrastructure for the open science movement. I will conclude by highlighting current challenges and ongoing work, inviting collaboration with the research community on future directions in metadata modeling, entity linking, and open metrics.