Words | Michele Pasin

2026

blog What the data doesn't show: presenting at CLACSO's funding flows project

Apr 2026

I was in Buenos Aires last week for the closing event of Tracking research funding flows in the Global South, a project run by CLACSO in partnership with CWTS/Leiden University and IDRC. I'd been invited to present on Dimensions as a funding data infrastructure - roughly fifteen minutes to explain what we collect, how it's structured, and where we stand on openness.

blog The Shifting Landscape of Research Analytics: From Data Access to Trustworthy Insights

Mar 2026

I watched the "Vibe Coding with Open Alex" video recently, and it's been rattling around in my head since.

2024

blog Unpacking OpenAlex topics classification

Sep 2024

In this post I have taken a closer look at the classification of scientific disciplines in OpenAlex, a recently developed database of scientific works. The topics classification has been entirely generated computationally using a mix of citation clustering techniques and LLM-based labeling. The results, although not always so precise, are definitely worth exploring further.

2023

blog SciGraph 2017-2023

Feb 2023

Springer Nature retired SciGraph earlier this month. I have been the data architect and then technical lead for this project, so this is post is just a reminder of the great things we did in it. Also, a little rant about the things that weren't that great...

2017

blog SciGraph publishes 1 billion facts as Linked Open Data

Nov 2017

Last Thursday, we reached a major milestone for the SciGraph project: nearly 1 billion facts (= RDF statements) have been released as Linked Open Data, most of it under a CC-BY license!

blog Exploring SciGraph data using JSON-LD, Elastic Search and Kibana

Apr 2017

Hello there data lovers! In this post you can find some information on how to download and make some sense of the scholarly dataset recently made available by the Springer Nature SciGraph project, by using the freely available Elasticsearch suite of software.

2016

blog Leipzig Semantics 2016 conference

Oct 2016

A few weeks ago, I attended the SEMANTiCS conference in Leipzig, so here's a short report about the event.

2013

blog 2012: a look back (for this blog)

Jan 2013

With the end of the year comes the time for reviewing the progress made, and with this blog, I can't really complain! Thanks so much to all of you invisible internauts for stopping by and taking part in the conversation. It's been a real pleasure contributing to this fantastic web of knowledge.

2012

blog Open Knowledge Festival – Helsinki, 18-22 September 2012

Sep 2012

I'm at the OKFestival this week. Tons of inspiring talks. I'm writing this post incrementally because I've got lots of notes floating around... so sorry for the mess!

2011

blog Working toward meritocracy in Italy

Jan 2011

It's no news that thousands of Italian researchers have left their home country in order to pursue their careers; what is news, however, is that we now have a scientific study shedding light on this phenomenon. It was conducted by the Via Academy, an association dedicated to statistical analyses of the research outputs of Italians (published on the TIS reports website).

2007

blog What can the analytical engine do? Ask Charles Babbage..

Jun 2007

I recently read the original article of Charles Babbage - which deals with the work he and Lady Ada Augusta Countess of Lovelace did on the Analytical Engine, one of the (mechanical) predecessors of the modern computer - thanks to a blog post from David Dodds. I guess that his position is representative of that one of many people in the xml community - people who, when facing the ontologists/AI/intelligent-agents/SW prophets, always try to keep things down to earth. But anyways. The original passage from the Countess of Lovelace is quite interesting: