Lena John

Tim Wittenborg, Omar Imad Remmo, Claudia Frick et al.

Public broadcasts are at the center of civic discourse: Traditional television talk shows, alongside emerging podcast and web video formats, capture and guide the attention of our societies, shaping how citizens encounter politics, science, and societal issues. Yet, systematic or even simple analyses of these formats face similar challenges: guest and content metadata are scarce, fleeting, fragmented, and not standardized. Research conducted and questions answered are based on extensive, laborious, yet isolated data-curation efforts that capture only a fraction of the relevant landscape. This work seeks to address this issue using a scaling-oriented framework for FAIR data curation in public broadcasting. Evaluated on 15 broadcasting programs, the pipeline aggregates ZDF Archive PDFs, fernsehserien.de, and Wikidata into a unified knowledge graph. Of the 31,817 candidate guest mentions from these three sources, 17,729 could be automatically disambiguated, further 5,958 via 64 hours of manual reconciling using OpenRefine. Results are published at speakermining.wikibase.cloud and linked to Wikidata, enabling SPARQL-based question answering based on gender, age, occupation, or institutional affiliation across 8,436 canonical persons with 23,527 appearances in 6,469 aligned episodes. Our iterative experience reveals that correctly disambiguating and deduplicating speaker data from heterogeneous sources demands dedicated effort on sustainable infrastructure. For scalable and reliable question answering on public broadcasts to be accessible to everyone, we recommend fostering the potential of linked open data: Advancing alignment and utilization approaches like this work, particularly towards crowdsourced development and curation, but also more FAIR data interfaces from public broadcast service providers.

Lena John, Ahmed Malek Ghanmi, Tim Wittenborg et al.

As the volume of scientific literature grows, efficient knowledge organization becomes increasingly challenging. Traditional approaches to structuring scientific content are time-consuming and require significant domain expertise, highlighting the need for tool support. We present ExtracTable, a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) workflow and framework that assists researchers in transforming unstructured publications into structured representations. The workflow combines large language models (LLMs) with user-defined schemas and is designed for downstream integration into knowledge graphs (KGs). Developed and evaluated in the context of the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), ExtracTable automates key steps such as document preprocessing and data extraction while ensuring user oversight through validation. In an evaluation with ORKG community participants following the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP), ExtracTable demonstrated high usability and practical value. Participants gave it an average System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 84.17 (A+, the highest rating). The time to progress from a research interest to literature-based insights was reduced from between 4 hours and 2 weeks to an average of 24:40 minutes. By streamlining corpus creation and structured data extraction for knowledge graph integration, ExtracTable leverages LLMs and user models to accelerate literature reviews. However, human validation remains essential to ensure quality, and future work will address improving extraction accuracy and entity linking to existing knowledge resources.

Lena John, Kheir Eddine Farfar, Sören Auer et al.

Scientific publications, primarily digitized as PDFs, remain static and unstructured, limiting the accessibility and reusability of the contained knowledge. At best, scientific knowledge from publications is provided in tabular formats, which lack semantic context. A more flexible, structured, and semantic representation is needed to make scientific knowledge understandable and processable by both humans and machines. We propose an evolution model of knowledge representation, inspired by the 5-star Linked Open Data (LOD) model, with five stages and defined criteria to guide the stepwise transition from a digital artifact, such as a PDF, to a semantic representation integrated in a knowledge graph (KG). Based on an exemplary workflow implementing the entire model, we developed a hybrid approach, called SciMantify, leveraging tabular formats of scientific knowledge, e.g., results from secondary studies, to support its evolving semantification. In the approach, humans and machines collaborate closely by performing semantic annotation tasks (SATs) and refining the results to progressively improve the semantic representation of scientific knowledge. We implemented the approach in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), an established platform for improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of scientific knowledge. A preliminary user experiment showed that the approach simplifies the preprocessing of scientific knowledge, reduces the effort for the evolving semantification, and enhances the knowledge representation through better alignment with the KG structures.