For more than 25 years now, the dblp computer science bibliography has been indexing and supporting international computer science research. Since today, the future of the database has also been secured at the Leibniz Center for Informatics Schloss Dagstuhl.
To mark this occasion, a festive colloquium will be held at the University of Trier on Friday, November 23rd, 2018. Under the motto “25 years of dblp – 2²² entries” the database also celebrates the milestone of more than 4 million indexed computer science publications. As first keynote speaker, Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum (Research Director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken and former member of the German Council of Science and Humanities) will give an insight into the opportunities and challenges of machine knowledge with his keynote “Machine Knowledge: Encyclopedic, Scholarly, Commonsense”. In the second keynote, “Strategic Tools for Scientific Sovereignty”, Prof. Dr. Claude Kirchner (INRIA France, Chairman of the INRIA Operational Committee for the Assessment of Ethical and Legal Risks) will talk about strategic tools that allow researchers to maintain sovereignty over their work and to guarantee the benefit for the common good in a drastically changing scientific landscape.
The transfer of the database from the University of Trier to the Leibniz Center for Informatics in Schloss Dagstuhl takes place just in time for the anniversary. A corresponding agreement was passed by the committees of both institutions and will be signed at the festive colloquium. With the decision of the Joint Science Conference (GWK) on November 16th, 2018, a new Schloss Dagstuhl branch office for the dblp team has been established on Campus II of the University of Trier. The database will continue to be operated and researched in close cooperation with the University, the Department of Computer Sciences, and the Trier Center for Informatics Research and Technology (CIRT).
The dblp computer science bibliography was founded in 1993 by Dr. Michael Ley at the University of Trier. In creating dblp, Ley reacted to the special publication culture in computer science, where conference contributions – which are often quite difficult to research – play a more important role than publications in scholarly journals. Since 2010, the database has been operated and further developed together with Schloss Dagstuhl in order to improve the thematic coverage and to ensure the long-term sustainability of the infrastructure. Today, dblp indexes more than 4.3 million scholarly articles, monographs, and collections (as of November 2018), being the world’s most comprehensive, openly accessible bibliographic database in computer science. Every year, the collection grows by more than 400,000 new entries; this corresponds to more than 1,600 new entries per working day.
In recent years, the database has grown to be a powerful tool that supports computer scientists worldwide in their search for articles, ideas and experts. The dblp team places particular emphasis on the reliability and quality of the metadata entries. Via its website https://dblp.org, dblp provides an insight into the complex interrelationships and networks of international computer science research. All data is also made available for reuse to the general public via so-called “Linked Open Data” interfaces. Every month, the dblp servers record more than 30 million page impressions by over half a million users from all over the world. The database has already been honoured with several prizes such as the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.
