Using Linked Data to Evaluate the Impact of Research and Development in Europe: A Structural Equation Model [chapter]

Amrapali Zaveri, Joao Ricardo Nickenig Vissoci, Cinzia Daraio, Ricardo Pietrobon
2013 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
Europe has a high impact on the global biomedical literature, having contributed with a growing number of research articles and a significant citation impact. However, the impact of research and development generated by European countries on economic, educational and healthcare performance is poorly understood. The recent Linking Open Data (LOD) project has made a lot of data sources publicly available and in human-readable formats. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of LOD in assessing
more » ... he impact of Research and Development (R&D) on the economic, education and healthcare performance in Europe. We extract relevant variables from two LOD datasets, namely World Bank and Eurostat. We analyze the data for 20 out of the 27 European countries over a span of 10 years (1999 to 2009). We use a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach to quantify the impact of R&D on the different measures. We perform different exploratory and confirmatory factorial analysis evaluations which gives rise to four latent variables that are included in the model: (i) Research and Development (R&D), (ii) Economic Performance (EcoP), (iii) Educational Performance (EduP), (iv) Healthcare performance (HcareP) of the European countries. Our results indicate the importance of R&D to the overall development of the European educational and healthcare performance (directly) and economic performance (indirectly). The results also shows the practical applicability of LOD to estimate this impact. H. Alani et al. (Eds.): ISWC 2013, Part II, LNCS 8219, pp. 244-259, 2013. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Using Linked Data to Evaluate the Impact of R&D in Europe 245 and medium term effects on industrial innovation [24] . Europe, as a whole, has a high impact on the global biomedical literature, having contributed with a growing number of articles (210, 433 publications in public health research [23] ) and a significant citation impact [22] . The impact of Europe on broader healthcare and social welfare issues, however, is poorly understood. Although the credit goes to the university research for economic impact, there is no consensus on how to measure it [4] . There have been previous projects that focus on measuring similar impact [6, 9] . However, these methods have not scaled up to the challenges of multidimensional assessments that is required to measure the overall impact of research and development on healthcare quality. Moreover, the datasets lack in openness, dynamicity and coverage. Measuring this impact poses a challenging endeavor which involves the identification, gathering and analyzing of diverse data. The recent Linking Open Data (LOD) project offers the possibility to access a large number of datasets in various domains 1 , which it possible to quickly extend the breadth of the traditional methods to measure this impact. Extensions include not only measures of overall impact on healthcare, but also indicators, all mediated through measures of research and development. Thus, the objective of this paper is twofold: (i) show the feasibility and the usefulness of combining different LOD data-sources to assess the impact of research and development (R&D) on the economic, educational and healthcare performance, specifically in European countries and (ii) employ a structural equation modeling approach to assess this impact. Therefore, we retrieved relevant data from two socio-economic datasets already available as LOD -World Bank and Eurostat. We applied a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach to combine the variables and quantify the impact based on different measures such as economic, educational and healthcare. Performing different exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis model evaluations gave rise to four latent variables which were included in the model: (i) Research and Development (R&D), (ii) Economic Performance (EcoP), (iii) Educational Performance (EduP), (iv) Healthcare performance (HcareP) of the European countries. The results indicate the importance of R&D to the overall development of the european educational as well as healthcare systems (directly) and economic performance (indirectly) and also shows the practical applicability of LOD in determining this impact.
doi:10.1007/978-3-642-41338-4_16 fatcat:5d3p5voq6jaspifrf4x3ekg7ce