Journals have the ISSN, conferences have nothing comparable. Acronyms are ambiguous (there are many ICCCs) and change over time, and publishers, libraries and registries each use their own keys. The data about conferences is therefore spread across many catalogues that do not know of each other.
confref joins them. It links the records that open sources hold about conference series and their editions, and assigns each series and each edition one persistent identifier.
Sources
Sources include:
- dblp (Schloss Dagstuhl): 62,560 proceedings volumes of 7,196 conference series
- Wikidata: 35,271 conferences, series and proceedings
- ConfIDent (TIB Hannover): 19,995 curated events, with 2,229 series
- Springer LOD (2018): 9,327 conferences
- GND (German National Library): authority records for the conferences, series and places the other datasets name
Records of the same series or edition are linked across the sources, and each set of links records the method that produced it and its measured quality. Source statements are kept apart from derived content, and every dataset is generated by code from documented inputs.
History: from the Springer LOD Pilot to confref
confref was founded in 2013 by Kai Eckert, then at the University of Mannheim, and Aliaksandr Birukou at Springer, as the Springer LOD Pilot: publishing the metadata of the conference proceedings published by Springer as Linked Open Data, enriching it and linking it to other data in the LOD cloud. dblp and the Linked Data Lab of TU Wien were the first data providers. lod.springer.com went online in 2014 and was publicly launched in 2015, under CC0.
The project moved with Kai Eckert to Stuttgart Media University in 2015. In 2018, Springer Nature handed over the lod.springer.com data and the portal code, and Digital Science funded the next step with a Catalyst Grant. portal.confref.org went online in 2019 and, after dblp was integrated in 2020, listed about 38,000 conferences.
From 2019, the work turned to persistent identifiers for conferences: in a Crossref and DataCite working group and, from 2020, together with TIB Hannover on ConfIDent. The results were published as Persistent Identification for Conferences (Data Science Journal 21, 2022).
After the move to TH Mannheim in 2023 the portal was discontinued. Since 2026, confref is being rebuilt as an open knowledge graph.
Acknowledgements
Hosting: University of Mannheim (2013–2015) and Stuttgart Media University (2015–2023). First data providers: dblp (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) and TU Wien (Linked Data Lab). Data and funding: Springer Nature and Digital Science. Development and cooperation: Net Wise and TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology.