Using GraphQL to connect software with authors, publications and other scholarly resources


Facilitators: Martin Fenner, DataCite; Neil Chue Hong, Software Sustainability Institute and Frances Madden, British Library

In the context of the Collaborations Workshop (CW20), the EC-funded FREYA project is using persistent identifiers (PIDs), their metadata, and GraphQL to build the PID Graph, a graph of connected scholarly resources that can be queried, visualized and re-used in other ways. For software we use the more than 100,000 software packages described with DataCite DOIs and metadata. For easy access to this PID Graph we have started to write and share Jupyter notebooks that can be reused and extended.

In this demo session we will give an introduction to the GraphQL query language, will explain how GraphQL offers many advantages over REST APIs, and will demonstrate how it can be used for exploring connections between scholarly resources, including software. We will use the GraphQL API from DataCite available at https://api.datacite.org/graphql, and Jupyter notebooks running on MyBinder. To follow along with the examples, a computer and web browser, but no local installation of software are needed. We will demo a notebook that starts with the ORCID ID of a researcher and software author, will then look at software authored by this person, and will then find other connected resources, including other versions of the same software as well as associated publications and datasets.

More info and Registration: https://software.ac.uk/cw20/mini-workshops-and-demo-sessions#4.1