Information density of Event references

[WolfgangFahl]

In the paper "Persistent Identification for Conferences" by Julian Franken,Aliaksandr Birukou, Kai Eckert, Wolfgang Fahl, Christian Hauschke, and Christoph Lange which is under review as of 2021-10 we have explained the concept of a "Conference reference" (see below). In this discussion i am adding some details about the estimated information content of such references.
InformationDensity.xlsx

quantities versus information content (shannon/bits)

entity/attribute	min	est	max est	min	est	max est
Events	40000	700000	1000000	15	19	20
Event series	10000	140000	100000	13	17	17
Events per Series	4	5	10
years	70	120	500	6	7	9
month	12	12	12	4	4	4
startdate	365	365	365	9	9	9
enddate	365	365	365	9	9	9
country	106	150	249	7	7	8
region	680	1000	3807	9	10	12
acronym	10000	140000	100000	13	17	17
ordinal	40	100	400	5	7	9
frequency	3	5	10	2	2	3
scope	10	20	100	3	4	7
type	5	10	20	2	3	4
city	3000	10000	50000	12	13	16
venue	5000	150000	500000	12	17	19

Ideally an event should be uniquely identifiable just by acronym and year. With more information in the reference the reference gets "overdefined" - there is more information in it than is necessary to uniquely identify it. On the other hand the meta-information might not be accurate and therefore it is useful to have this extra information.

Conference reference

A conference reference is used to uniquely identify a conference. As long as no PID for conferences is available, the reference often consists of an acronym/year combination such as “ISWC 2019”. Consider a citation such as “Proceedings of The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019 18thInternational Semantic Web Conference, Auckland, New Zealand, October 26–30, 2019, Proceedings, Part I”. This reference points to the proceedings of a conference but not necessarily to the conference itself. Nevertheless, such references contain valuable information about the conference, which also makes indirect identification possible as intended by the citation style being used. We therefore identify the following elements commonly used in references:

• acronym
  short name for the conference often consisting of 3 to 8 upper case letters trying to be unique but actually often being ambiguous. For instance, ISWC may refer to the International Semantic Web Conference or to the International Symposium on Wearable Computing.

• frequency
  annual, biannual, triennial – most events have an annual frequency and this is mostly not stated explicitly (not stated explicitly in this example).

• event scope
  target scope of the conference such as “International, European, East Asian” (International)

• event type
  such as Conference, Workshop, Symposium (Conference)

• year
  two or four digit reference to the year in which the event took place – not to be confused with the year of publication of the proceedings, which might be different (2019)

• ordinal
  often used to enumerate the conference series instances (18th)

• date
  start date and sometimes end date or date range of the conference (October 26-30)

• location
  description of the location of the conference often consisting of country, region and city – sometimes with details about the exact venue. (Auckland, New Zealand)

• title
  the title often contains scope, type and subject of the conference (International Semantic Web Conference)

• subject
  description what the conference is about often prefixed with “on” (Semantic Web)

• delimiters
  a variety of syntactic delimiters such as blanks, comma, colon, brackets are used depending on the citation style.