dblp: polish HTML scrape/extract pipeline

4 files changed, 30 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/extra/dblp/.gitignore b/extra/dblp/.gitignore
index 8847a157..a04dd76e 100644
--- a/extra/dblp/.gitignore
+++ b/extra/dblp/.gitignore
@@ -1,3 +1,6 @@
 conf/
 journals/
 series/
+Pipfile.lock
+*.json
+*.html
diff --git a/extra/dblp/Pipfile b/extra/dblp/Pipfile
index b9ba84f6..a191e76f 100644
--- a/extra/dblp/Pipfile
+++ b/extra/dblp/Pipfile
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@ verify_ssl = true
 name = "pypi"
 
 [packages]
+selectolax = "*"
 
 [dev-packages]
 
diff --git a/extra/dblp/README.md b/extra/dblp/README.md
index d74f8bf9..f2fd02da 100644
--- a/extra/dblp/README.md
+++ b/extra/dblp/README.md
@@ -1,6 +1,12 @@
 
 This file describes hacks used to import dblp container metadata.
 
+As of December 2020 this is part of the dblp release metadata import pipeline:
+we must have conference and other non-ISSN containers created before running
+the release import. dblp does not publish container-level metadata in a
+structured format (eg, in their dumps), so scraping the HTML is unfortunately
+necessary.
+
 
 ## Quick Bootstrap Commands
 
@@ -12,9 +18,12 @@ and dump release entities in JSON; this takes some time:
 Next extract the unique set of dblp identifier prefixes, which will be used as
 container identifiers:
 
-    cat /data/dblp/dblp_releases.json | jq ._dblp_prefix | grep -v ^none | sort -u > /data/dblp/prefix_list.txt
+    cat /data/dblp/dblp_releases.json | jq ._dblp_prefix -r | grep -v ^null | sort -u > /data/dblp/prefix_list.txt
 
-Then fetch HTML documents from dblp.org for each prefix:
+Then fetch HTML documents from dblp.org for each prefix. Note that currently
+only single-level containers will download successfully, and only journals,
+conf, and series sections. Books, Tech Reports, etc may be nice to include in
+the future.
 
     mkdir -p journals
     mkdir -p conf
@@ -27,7 +36,7 @@ Then fetch HTML documents from dblp.org for each prefix:
 
 Using the python script in this directory, extract metadata from these HTML documents:
 
-    fd .html | ./dblp_html_extract.py | pv -l > dblp_container_meta.json
+    fd html conf/ journals/ series/ | ./dblp_html_extract.py | pv -l > dblp_container_meta.json
 
 This can be imported into fatcat using the dblp-container importer:
 
diff --git a/python/fatcat_tools/importers/dblp_release.py b/python/fatcat_tools/importers/dblp_release.py
index 9cebcdc2..5cbc95d0 100644
--- a/python/fatcat_tools/importers/dblp_release.py
+++ b/python/fatcat_tools/importers/dblp_release.py
@@ -5,6 +5,20 @@ Importer for DBLP release-level (article/paper/etc) XML metadata.
 Works similarly to PubMed XML importer: expects to have a large XML file
 iterated over quickly, with individual elements re-parsed into smaller objects
 and passed to `parse_record()`.
+
+There are two valuable pieces of relationship metadata in dblp:
+
+- container linkages, especially to conferences which do not have ISSNs, and
+  thus no existing fatcat containers
+- author disambiguation, which is a work in progress but anecdotally higher
+  quality than MAG, Semantic Scholar, etc
+
+We are not going to do author (creator) ingest at this time. For containers,
+import would be made much easier if we updated the database schema to include
+dblp_prefix as a lookup key, but this is more difficult for containers than
+with releases, so we are going to skip it for now. This leaves us with a
+brittle/unreliable TSV lookup mechanism for prefix-to-container_id (as of
+December 2020).
 """
 
 import sys  # noqa: F401