The zbMATH Open Knowledge Graph: Tracing Centuries of Mathematical Research

Abstract

We present the zbMATH Open Knowledge Graph, a large-scale RDF knowledge graph (KG) covering more than 250 years of mathematical scholarship. Unlike existing scholarly knowledge graphs that primarily capture bibliographic metadata and citation structures, the zbMATH Open KG integrates expert-curated semantic content, including reviews, keywords, subject classifications, software references, and disambiguated authorship. This combination of domain-specific representation of mathematical knowledge and extensive temporal coverage supports analyses that require fine-grained exploration of mathematical concepts, research fields, and scholarly relationships over time. The resulting graph comprises 34 million entities and 168 million RDF triples represented using established Semantic Web vocabularies, supporting interoperability and FAIR data principles. We further demonstrate its capabilities through query-driven historically grounded scholarly exploration use cases, illustrating how the knowledge graph can surface relationships and patterns that may be difficult to identify from bibliographic and citation information alone. The zbMATH Open KG provides an open semantic infrastructure for studying the development of mathematical knowledge and tracing scholarly connections across centuries of scholarship.