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Buzzbang is a project to enable applications to find and use Bioschemas markup, and to provide a Google-like search frontend. It is at an early alpha stage but has already been used in some prototype applications.

This wiki contains the crawler part of the project. The search engine frontend is here, with a live demo at http://buzzbang.science

Media

• I (justincc) recently made a presentation on Buzzbang at the Bioschemas Samples hackathon. At some point the relevant architectural bits will be transferred into this wiki.
• I also wrote a blogpost about this meeting.

State of play

schema.org is a community project to develop a set of schemas that can be embedded in webpages, in formats such as JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata. Example schemas include Movie, Store and Product. Among other usecases, this embedded data can then be crawled by search engines such as Google and Yandex, and used to return useful structured results on queries (such as the information boxes you see on some Google search results).

Bioschemas is a community project by the life sciences community to specify how schemas from schema.org can be used to markup life sciences information. As such, it has 2 aspects:

1. When using existing schema.org schemas, such as DataCatalog and Dataset, Bioschemas will specify which properties are mandatory, which optional and the cardinality of properties. This is because schema.org itself specifies none of these things.
2. In some cases, Bioschemas will come up with new schemas, such as BioChemEntity to describe biological and chemical entities, where nothing suitable pre-exists in schema.org. Once these have gone through review by the Bioschemas community, they will also be suggested to the main schema.org community.

Bioschemas is an extremely young project. As such, the specifications are subject to considerable change and some are not final (in particular BioChemEntity). In addition, very few life sciences information sources have yet implemented this markup. Nonetheless, bsbang-crawler is an alpha project to start crawling this data so that it can then be searched in the companion frontend project, and later on possibly joined together using embedded ontology terms in the form of a knowledge graph.

As an alpha project, bsbang-crawler is itself subject to considerable change. Until now, the crawler has been custom written. However, this is a poor choice for future scalability and maintainability, so whilst there might be a bit more work done on the custom crawler code, we are actively looking at a Transition to an established crawler package.

There is a companion bsbang-frontend companion project which is a very simple Google-like search engine on top of the extracted data.

Implementation

• Architecture
• Transition to an established crawler package - Notes on transition from the current custom crawling code to using an existing crawling package such as Scrapy.

Limitations

Buzzbang, certainly at this stage, will only crawl JSON-LD markup, no other page scraping will be performed - if it isn't in the markup then it won't be extracted. This is a deliberate design choice to keep the crawler simpler and encourage markup in Bioschemas, which is the whole point of Bioschemas.

It currently only crawls DataCatalog and PhysicalEntity (soon to be renamed to BioChemEntity) JSON-LD found at pre-registered URLs, which are either webpages or crawlable sitemap.xml.

Life sciences websites with Bioschemas markup

Some sites have initial markup, chiefly those listed in https://github.com/justinccdev/bsbang-crawler/blob/dev/conf/default-targets.txt. However, this is very limited in scope. The most promising set of sites for initial markup are samples databases. As shown on the Bioschemas front page, there is an event on 15-16 March 2018 to introduce the Bioschemas Sample schema to Biobanks, for their feedback and to help them implement markup on their sites if they choose to do so. This may result in a large amount of useful real-world markup that Buzzbang can crawl.

Archive

Notes for GSOC students - this also contains some information about state of Bioschemas and the project that might be useful here.

Related work

• Federico has done some parallel work on scraping Bioschemas markup with Scrapy. We need to assess this and see how it could be incorporated into the next stage of Buzzbang.
• Ricardo Arcila is writing a [https://github.com/ricardoaat/bioschemas-gocrawlit](minimal crawler and extractor of Bioschemas) in Go.

References

• Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web - A good introduction to schema.org, the parent project to Bioscheams.
• Bioschemas Introduction and Update - Rafael Jiminez's bioschemas presentation. Worth reviewing (unfortunately there is no paper available for bioschemas yet).
• Bioschemas website - Worth reviewing to get a feel for what Bioschemas is. The website is currently being updated.