An entity-based platform for the integration of social and scientific services

Over the last few years, several services and platforms for scientific production and dissemination have appeared (e.g. scholarly search engines, digital libraries, blogs, social networks, and conference management systems). Yet, these services are really fragmented and, in some cases, lack critical mass to become useful tools for the scientific community. Furthermore, most of them have failed to create a virtual environment where users' needs and activities are supported. In this paper, we present an entity-based platform aimed at integrating papers, persons, events and the services they enable. Conferences (events) are used as a starting point for collecting a critical mass of users: upon registration attendees become part of the community and can contribute to it, discussing publications, sharing content (e.g. presentations, videos, notes and pictures), or adding additional information on their page. The paper describes the user-centered research that has led to the design and presents its architecture which was shown during the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2011.