Category Archives: oa.microsoft

Pieter Vander Vennet’s Diary | OpenStreetMap is in trouble | OpenStreetMap

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“It is a long-standing tradition that every now and then, a member of the OpenStreetMap-community posts that OSM is in trouble. Often times, these essays complain about some trivial things which are, in the end, not that important. For example, they complain that we didn’t implement Bézier curves yet (we don’t need them), or that the data model is stale (it isn’t, new tagging appears every day), that the main OSM.org website doesn’t have some feature and isn’t on par with Google Maps (that’s by intent) or that AI will make the entire manual mapping space obsolete, in “just another ten years time”.

However, most of these things miss the crucial point of what OSM is: a community; a group of people that are working together on mapping the world in an Open Data way and building related tools with Open Source. Our strength is the unison in this goal, even though everyone pursues this differently, through different technological means and for different motivations. Motivations range from the most mundane reasons up till political activism. And that’s fine. All this activity and diversity strengthens us as a global community.

However, recently, a new participant has entered the ecosystem with parasitic intents. It tries to capture away precisely what makes OSM strong: the contributors.

The means to this end is called ‘Bing Map Builder’….”

GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“I have had people tell me with doctrinal certainty that Creative Commons licenses allow text and data mining, and insofar as license terms are observed, I agree. The making of copies to perform text and data mining, machine learning, and AI training (collectively “TDM”) without additional licensing is authorized for commercial and non-commercial purposes under CC BY, and for non-commercial purposes under CC BY-NC. (Full disclosure: CCC offers RightFind XML, a service that supports licensed commercial access to full-text articles for TDM with value-added capabilities.)

I have long wondered, however, about the interplay between the attribution requirement (i.e., the “BY” in CC BY) and TDM. After all, the bargain with those licenses is that the author allows reuse, typically at no cost, but requires attribution. Attribution under the CC licenses may be the author’s primary benefit and motivation, as few authors would agree to offer the licenses without credit.

In the TDM context, this raises interesting questions:

Does the attribution requirement mean that the author’s information may not be removed as a data element from the content, even if inclusion might frustrate the TDM exercise or introduce noise into the system?
Does the attribution need to be included in the data set at every stage?
Does the result of the mining need to include attribution, even if hundreds of thousands of CC BY works were mined and the output does not include content from individual works?

While these questions may have once seemed theoretical, that is no longer the case. An analogous situation involving open software licenses (GNU and the like) is now being litigated….”

Linux Foundation Announces Overture Maps Foundation to Build Interoperable Open Map Data

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“The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation, a new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide. The initiative was founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom and is open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data.

Overture’s mission is to enable current and next-generation map products by creating reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. This interoperable map is the basis for extensibility, enabling companies to contribute their own data. Members will combine resources to build map data that is complete, accurate, and refreshed as the physical world changes. Map data will be open and extensible by all under an open data license. This will drive innovation by enabling a network of communities that create services on top of Overture data….”

Linux, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft want to break the Google Maps monopoly | Ars Technica

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“Google Maps is getting some competition. The Linux Foundation has announced Overture Maps, a “new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide.” It’s an open source mapping effort that includes a list of heavy hitters: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, with the foundation adding that the project is “open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data.”…

If you’re saying, “Wait! isn’t there already an open source map community out there?”  There is, and it’s called “OpenStreetMap,” the Wikipedia of maps that anyone can edit. The Overture press release says, “The project will seek to integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new map data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI/ML techniques to create a living digital record of the physical world.” …”

OpenAlex: The open catalog to the global research system

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“OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world’s scholarly papers, researchers, journals, and institutions — along with all the ways they’re connected to one another.

Using OpenAlex, you can build your own scholarly search engine, recommender service, or knowledge graph. You can help manage research by tracking citation impact, spotting promising new research areas, and identifying and promoting work from underrepresented groups. And you can do research on research itself, in areas like bibliometrics,science and technology studies, and Science of science policy

Because we think all research should be free and open, OpenAlex is free and open itself, and we’re built on a fully Open Source codebase.

We believe the global research system is one of humankind’s most beautiful creations. OpenAlex aims to make that whole beautiful creation available to everyone, everywhere….

Let’s start way back at the beginning, with the ancient Library of Alexandria. Working create a Universal Library, they didn’t just gather knowledge — they made it useful by indexing it in the world’s first library catalog, the Pinakes. That’s what we’re trying to do, too, and so our name is an homage to them!

Fast forward a few millenia: OpenAlex had been a dream at our little nonprofit for a long time, but two doors opened simultaneously in May 2021. First, we received a generous, $4.5M grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Second, Microsoft announced it would shutter Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which much of the community has come to rely upon as our best index of scholarly communication. So, we had the means and the opportunity, and we ran with it!…”

OpenAlex: The open catalog to the global research system

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“OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world’s scholarly papers, researchers, journals, and institutions — along with all the ways they’re connected to one another.

Using OpenAlex, you can build your own scholarly search engine, recommender service, or knowledge graph. You can help manage research by tracking citation impact, spotting promising new research areas, and identifying and promoting work from underrepresented groups. And you can do research on research itself, in areas like bibliometrics,science and technology studies, and Science of science policy

Because we think all research should be free and open, OpenAlex is free and open itself, and we’re built on a fully Open Source codebase.

We believe the global research system is one of humankind’s most beautiful creations. OpenAlex aims to make that whole beautiful creation available to everyone, everywhere….

Let’s start way back at the beginning, with the ancient Library of Alexandria. Working create a Universal Library, they didn’t just gather knowledge — they made it useful by indexing it in the world’s first library catalog, the Pinakes. That’s what we’re trying to do, too, and so our name is an homage to them!

Fast forward a few millenia: OpenAlex had been a dream at our little nonprofit for a long time, but two doors opened simultaneously in May 2021. First, we received a generous, $4.5M grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Second, Microsoft announced it would shutter Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which much of the community has come to rely upon as our best index of scholarly communication. So, we had the means and the opportunity, and we ran with it!

Our first beta data dump release was in in mid-November, 2021. OpenAlex will remain in beta until our official launch on January 3, 2022 — just in time to take up the mantle from MAG, which closes up shop December 31st….”

Open search tools need sustainable funding – Research Professional News

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“The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered an explosion of knowledge, with more than 200,000 papers published to date. At one point last year, scientific output on the topic was doubling every 20 days. This huge growth poses big challenges for researchers, many of whom have pivoted to coronavirus research without experience or preparation.

Mainstream academic search engines are not built for such a situation. Tools such as Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science provide long, unstructured lists of results with little context.

These work well if you know what you are looking for. But for anyone diving into an unknown field, it can take weeks, even months, to identify the most important topics, publication venues and authors. This is far too long in a public health emergency.

The result has been delays, duplicated work, and problems with identifying reliable findings. This lack of tools to provide a quick overview of research results and evaluate them correctly has created a crisis in discoverability itself. …

Building on these, meta-aggregators such as Base, Core and OpenAIRE have begun to rival and in some cases outperform the proprietary search engines. …”

We’re building a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph – Our Research blog

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“This week Microsoft Research announced that their free bibliographic database–Microsoft Academic Graph, or MAG for short–is being discontinued. This is sad news, because MAG was a great source of open scholcomm metadata, including citation counts and author affiliations. MAG data is used in Unsub, as well as several other well-known open science tools.

Thankfully, we’ve got a contingency plan for this situation, which we’ve been working on for a while now. We’re building a successor to MAG. Like all our projects, it’ll be open-source and the data will be free to everyone via data dump and API. It will launch at the end of the year, when MAG is scheduled to disappear.

It’s important to note that this new service will not be a perfect replacement, especially right when it launches. MAG has excellent support for conference proceedings, for example; we won’t match that for a while, if ever.  Instead, we’ll be focusing on supporting the most important use-cases, and building out from there. If you use MAG today, we’d love to hear what your key use-cases are, so we can prioritize accordingly. Here’s where you can tell us.

We plan to have this launched by the time MAG disappears at year’s end. That’s an aggressive schedule, but we’ve built and launched other large projects (Unpaywall, Unsub) in less time. We’ve also got a good head start, since we’ve been working toward this as an internal project for a while now….”

Next Steps for Microsoft Academic – Expanding into New Horizons | Microsoft Research

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Microsoft Academic Website: No longer accessible after Dec. 31, 2020,
Microsoft Academic Graph: No longer providing updated data or access to old releases after Dec. 31, 2021; however, existing copies can still be used under license.

Microsoft Academic has been on a mission to explore new ways to empower researchers and research organizations to achieve more. The research project is characterized by two sets of technologies: one that reads all the Bing-indexed web pages and organizes the most up-to-date academic knowledge into a knowledge base called Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), and the other that performs semantic reasoning and inference to serve that knowledge through the Microsoft Academic search website and API. We are proud that these data and web services have been found useful in numerous research projects around the world, and excited to see more community-driven, public efforts emerge.

One question that we are asked frequently, though, is how the technologies powering Microsoft Academic can be used by institutions outside of academia to make organizational knowledge more discoverable and accessible. Over the years, we have openly shared some of the building blocks, such as the language and network similarity packages, and the core search engine MAKES.  With the continued progress in data access, we believe now is the right time to fully explore opportunities to extend this technology to new industries and transition to community approaches for academic research.

Microsoft Research will continue to support the automated AI agents powering Microsoft Academic services through the end of calendar year 2021. During this time, we encourage existing Microsoft Academic users to begin transitioning to other equivalent services. Below are just a few of the many great options available to the community.

Aminer
CrossRef
Dimensions
lens.org
OpenCitations
Scopus
Semantic Scholar

Thank you very much for the years of support and encouragement. We are immensely grateful to have learned and grown from your feedback over the years. As we are passing the torch to the community-driven efforts, we invite you to join us in continuously contributing ideas and suggestions to nurture, embrace, and grow these platforms.

 

Open Call Webinar – Peer Learning Network for Data Collaborations | Register – Contact information

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“The Open Data Institute has partnered with Microsoft to launch its Open Data Campaign, which aims to address the data divide and help organisations of all sizes to realise the benefits of data and the new technologies it powers. 

 

As part of the campaign, we’re launching a peer learning network that will convene organisations collaborating around data, providing them with financial and other support from the ODI and Microsoft. Ultimately this will enable them to more effectively address the challenges they face. 

 

On Thursday 29 October 2020, 9:00am PDT/ 4:00pm GMT / 5:00pm CET, join us for a live webinar to learn more about the peer learning network opportunity. We will go over the open call for applications in more detail and provide an opportunity for attendees to ask any related questions before the application deadline (17 November 2020 at 11:59pm PST / 18 November 7:59am GMT (8:59am CET). …”

Microsoft and the Open Data Institute join together to launch a Peer Learning Network for Data Collaborations – Microsoft on the Issues

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“Today, in partnership with the Open Data Institute (ODI), we are delighted to announce an open call for participation in a new Peer Learning Network for Data Collaborations. Peer learning networks are an important tool to foster the exchange of knowledge and help participants learn from one another so they can more effectively address the challenges they face.

In April, with the launch of Microsoft’s Open Data Campaign, we committed to putting open and shared data into practice by addressing specific challenges through data collaborations. For a data collaboration to achieve its goals, there are many factors that must come together successfully. Oftentimes, this process can be incredibly challenging. From aligning on key outcomes and data use agreements to preparing datasets for use and analysis, these considerations require time and extensive coordination….

Awardees will have the opportunity to:

receive up to £20,000 for their time over the six months of the peer learning network
learn about and receive guidance from the ODI and Microsoft on different technical approaches, governance mechanisms, and other means for managing data collaborations
connect with peers also working on these challenges

For the purpose of the Peer Learning Network, data collaborations are defined as:

involving a collaboration of companies, research institutions, non-profits, and/or government entities
addressing a clear societal or business-related challenge
are working to make their data as open as possible in the context of the collaboration (collaborations working with restrictions related to privacy or commercial sensitivity are encouraged to apply)
ultimately demonstrate increased access to, and/or meaningful use of, data in reaching the specific goal …”

Open data: Your questions answered | Microsoft On The Issues

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“Open data: The name alone can cause some confusion. Then there are some myths and misconceptions associated with it.

Organizations have questions about how and why they should make data freely available, or open.

We talked to Jule Sigall, Associate General Counsel, Open Innovation, in Microsoft Corporate, External and Legal Affairs, to explore this topic. Here are five of the most commonly encountered open data misconceptions, and responses to them….”

The Public Library Association and Microsoft announce initiative to help expand internet access in rural communities during COVID-19 crisis | News and Press Center

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“he Public Library Association (PLA) and Microsoft Corp. announced a new initiative today to increase access to technology in rural communities during the COVID-19 crisis. Microsoft will provide funding to help public libraries in rural communities extend WiFi access by installing public WiFi access points on or near library grounds….”

The Public Library Association and Microsoft announce initiative to help expand internet access in rural communities during COVID-19 crisis | News and Press Center

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“he Public Library Association (PLA) and Microsoft Corp. announced a new initiative today to increase access to technology in rural communities during the COVID-19 crisis. Microsoft will provide funding to help public libraries in rural communities extend WiFi access by installing public WiFi access points on or near library grounds….”

Microsoft commits patents to help fight COVID-19 – Microsoft on the Issues

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“I am very pleased to announce that, today, Microsoft is committing to the Open COVID Pledge by making its patents available free of charge for use in efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic and minimize the impact of the disease.  This step joins our other efforts to use technology and innovation to help track the disease and develop solutions, such as mobilizing AI for Health to fight COVID-19 and the Bing COVID19 Tracker. Additional information about Microsoft’s COVID-19 efforts can be found here.

We are always looking for ways we can use our patents to contribute to positive outcomes, and the fight against COVID-19 is one of the most urgent issues of our time. Pledges and open licensing of this kind can help spur innovation, especially in a crisis like this one. Researchers, scientists and others working to fight the virus should be able to develop and deploy effective solutions at scale without obstacles such as being threatened with patent litigation….”