Microsoft shares academic graph data with outside researchers for WSDM Cup

In a recent post, Microsoft Research talked about their WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining) Cup. In partnership with the 9th ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Microsoft Research gave ACM Conference attendees a chance to access data from Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Kuansan Wang, Director of Microsoft Research’s Internet Services Research Center, said of the WSDM Cup:

“The WSDM Cup is the first time a major commercial search engine, Microsoft Academic powered by Bing, has opened its data to the academic community for research. The graph, a continuously growing collection of millions of pieces of information about scientific publications, authors, institutions, journals, conferences, and fields of study, is the largest such graph in existence. We are also opening the graph’s back-end Academic Knowledge API. The service-based API enables researchers to access fresh data from the web crawled by an industrial-grade search engine. The community can build on top of our baseline system and test innovative ideas.”

The goal of the WSDM Cup is to provide the “best static rank values for each publication in the Microsoft Academic Graph.” The WSDM Cup challenged 80 teams from 34 academic organizations in 13 countries to battle it out within two months. Alex Wade, Director of Scholarly Communications at Microsoft Research added:

“The most commonly used measures of importance and impact in scholarship, such as citation counts, Journal Impact Factor, and h-index, are one-dimensional, looking solely at the citations between publications. But as we look into the richer and more varied relationships between the people, places, and things that make up the scholarly record, new opportunities for ranking and evaluation emerge. A key goal of this challenge was to test whether that heterogeneity can actually lead to improved ranking solutions. This is the beginning of a whole new era in data access and analysis that will benefit the research community for many years to come.”

Many researchers were happy that Microsoft willingly shared their Bing search engine data on scientific articles with the research community. Microsoft Research added an opportunity for the scientific community to collaborate and share information that could one day lead to important scientific discoveries, like cures to deadly diseases.

For more information, check out the WSDM Cup leaderboard or Project Oxford’s Academic Knowledge API.