DBLP - or Running an Indexing Service with very Limited Resources

Michael Ley (University of Trier)

GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Bonn, Germany, 27 October 2009

Abstract

Today DBLP is one of the most popular bibliographic data bases for the field of computer science. It was started in 1993 as a small personal experiment. In the first years the collection was focused on the computer science subfields "Data Base systems" and "Logic Programming" (DBLP) - later this acronym become meaningless because the coverage was expanded to many other areas.

Compared with professional data base producers like GESIS, FIZ Karlsruhe, or ZPID at Trier DBLP is maintained by a very small group and a tiny budget. With these constraints it is not possible to create 'deep' bibliographic records with abstracts, a classification, or citation information. DBLP provides only very basic bibliographic information. Our main focus is "authority control" for author names, i.e. we try to identity the persons and to deal with homonyms and synonyms.

The talk gives an overview of the history and current activities of the DBLP group. The goal of the talk is to start discussion and and exchange of experiences of data base producers from different fields ...