Enabling Social Demography Research using Semantic Technologies
May 28, 2024 120 views 
A shift in scientific publishing from paper-based to knowledge-based practices promotes reproducibility, machine actionability and knowledge discovery. This is important for disciplines like social demography, where study indicators are often social constructs such as race or education, hypothesis tests are challenging to compare due to their limited temporal and spatial coverage, and research output is presented in natural language, which can be ambiguous and imprecise. In this work, we present the MIRA resource, to aid researchers in their research workflow, and publish FAIR findings. MIRA consists of: (1) an ontology for social demography research, (2) a method for automated ontology population by prompting Large Language Models, and (3) a knowledge graph populated in terms of the ontology by annotating a set of research papers on health inequality. The resource allows researchers to formally represent their social demography research hypotheses, discovering research biases and novel research questions.