We are pleased to share an early version of a new API endpoint for relationships. This is a result of ongoing work to merge several sources of metadata and streamline our data storage. The overall aim is to improve support for existing services, and implement new features in response to requests by the community. The relationships endpoint is the first result of this effort and combines Event Data with citation and relationship metadata from members. It reports whether a connection exists between two metadata records and is key to implementing the Research Nexus.
The new architecture provides some significant simplifications for how we process and present Event Data, and the Relationships endpoint will eventually replace the Event Data API. It will provide better support for links between different types of research outputs, including for data and software citations. Article to article citations, funding relationships, authorship, and other types of links will also become much easier to access.
We’re giving a sneak preview at this early stage in order to get feedback about where to focus next. Our hard-working developers have limited capacity and we want to focus their efforts on what will have the most impact for the community. We also want to give current Event Data users a chance to react and let us know what they would need in place to be able to switch from processing events to processing relationships. We won’t rush the changeover and want to get a dialog going as early as possible to make the process as possible. Note that there are some limitations on how it looks currently: the preview has a sample database containing about 1% of our total database. The available query filters and metadata displayed are limited, if there is something you’d like to see then let us know.
If you want to get your hands on some relationships, check out the documentation from where you can run queries, or see a few examples we’ve put into a Colab notebook . Please share your feedback, experiences and questions here. Alternatively, you can contact Martyn Rittman.