Quick links: Use Ricgraph & Read news about Ricgraph & Go to the Documentation website & Consult the Table of contents, or the Index.
Ricgraph, 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. It is flexible and extensible, and can be adapted to new application areas.
Ricgraph is unique because it allows you to:
- Explore collaborations between (sub-)organizations with Ricgraph.
- Explore Open science with Ricgraph.
- Enhance research information systems with Ricgraph.
The nice thing about Ricgraph is that anyone with Python knowledge can easily extend it, so you can use Ricgraph to test your own ideas or to create your own applications.
You can use Ricgraph either as a standalone tool, or as a component that provides a graph based data structure with a number of handy tools. Ricgraph has been developed for the application area research information, and it can be used for other application areas that require relations between items from various source systems.
You may want to watch the following videos about Ricgraph. The left one is a short video, only including the Ricgraph use cases. The right one is a more extensive one (also including the use cases).
| Ricgraph use cases video (1m30s) | Ricgraph introduction video including use cases (2m28s) |
| Click to play or download the Ricgraph use cases video. | Click to play or download the Ricgraph introduction video. |
To learn more about Ricgraph, please go to the Ricgraph website www.ricgraph.eu.
If you would like to know more details about Ricgraph, please go to the Ricgraph documentation website docs.ricgraph.eu.
- Read more about Why Ricgraph is unique.
- The philosophy of Ricgraph is that it stores metadata, not the objects the metadata refer to. To access an object, a node has a link to that object in the system it was obtained from.
- We have chosen a graph as a data structure, since it is a logical and efficient method to access objects which are close to objects they have a relation to. For example, starting with a person, its research outputs are only one step away by following one edge, and other contributors to that research output are again one step (edge) away.
- Ricgraph can be used to store, manipulate and read metadata of any object that has a relation to another object, as long as every object can be "represented" by at least a name and a value. In Ricgraph, one node represents one object, and an edge represents the relation between two objects.
- Ricgraph and Ricgraph Explorer are written in Python. You can use two different graph database backends: Neo4j and Memgraph.
- The objective of Ricgraph is to get metadata from objects from a source system in a process called "harvesting". That means that e.g. persons and publications can be harvested from one system, data sets from another system, and software from a third system. Everything found will be combined into one graph.
- Ricgraph can harvest from many sources, and you can write your own harvesting scripts. Example scripts are included to harvest from the OpenAlex, the Research Information System Pure, the data repository Yoda, the Research Software Directory, and for the Utrecht University staff pages.
- Ricgraph is an ID resolver. It can, given an identifier of a person, easily find other identifiers of that person. When new identifiers are found when harvesting from new systems, they will be added automatically.
Ricgraph has been created and is being maintained by Rik D.T. Janssen from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. You can find contact details at his Utrecht University employee page. He also has an ORCID profile on ORCID 0000-0001-9510-0802. You can contact him for presentations, demos and workshops.
For more details, including subscribing to the Ricgraph newsletter and opportunities for collaboration, read the Ricgraph contact page.
If you like Ricgraph, please give it a GitHub Star by clicking on the top right Star button on the Ricgraph GitHub page https://github.com/UtrechtUniversity/ricgraph. If you have any suggestions or improvements, please let me know by creating a GitHub Issue at the top left of that page.
This README.md file is part of the documentation for version 3.4 of Ricgraph - Research in context graph.