Service and software development

One of the tasks of the ORKG service and software development team is maintaining the ORKG platform. We focus on creating innovative tools for researchers and at the same time producing maintainable high-quality software code. The platform consists of several main components: the frontend, the backend and related services, and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) services.

 The frontend provides the graphical user interfaces for the ORKG on the web. The frontend uses React and Javascript as core technologies. The backend provides REST APIs, consumed by the frontend, and is created using the Spring Framework and is written in Kotlin. Furthermore, the backend communicates with the Neo4j Graph Database, which acts as our main data storage. In addition to the backend, there are several microservices, each responsible for their own task in the system. Most of the microservices are using FastAPI and are written in Python. Finally, there are the NLP services, which provide access to several NLP services and models. Some of the NLP models are developed in-house and are specifically tailored towards scholarly knowledge. In addition to the ORKG platform, we maintain other clients, such as the ORKG Python package. This package makes it easier to communicate to the ORKG backend when using Python.

To learn more about the ORKG software code, visit our Gitlab page.