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Success Story

Building a Cross-Country Open Data Platform for Gender Equality in STEM Leadership 

Thanks to the use of GraphDB, the Equality in Leadership for Latin American STEM (ELLAS) initiative powered the first regional open data platform enabling centralized data collection, easier policy evaluation, and improved visibility of women’s representation across institutions.

The Client

Multi-country research and policy initiative aimed at closing the gender gap in STEM leadership through data transparency, policy evaluation, and cross-institutional collaboration.

The Challenge

The ELLAS initiative needed to integrate and unify fragmented, multi-country data into a usable, policy-ready platform, without requiring technical expertise from its users

The Solution

ELLAS adopted GraphDB to power a centralized, policy-ready knowledge graph that collects and visualize data from 40+ data sources in a user-friendly front-end interface for non-technical users

Technical capabilities

  • Built a centralized, policy-ready, cross-country knowledge graph integrated data from 40+ sources
  • Automated data ingestion with custom pipelines and SHACL data validation

Business outcomes

  • Created an open access, user-friendly platform for non-technical users  
  • Enhanced policy evaluation and visibility of women’s representation in STEM

The Challenge

The ELLAS initiative aimed to build a multi-country open data platform that could unify gender and STEM-related data across countries like Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia, each with unique data collection policies, languages, and standards. 

The platform’s task was to provide and encourage the use of accurate data for understanding the deep roots of gender disparities, evaluating policies, implementing evidence-based interventions, and promoting accountability and transparency.

The main challenges the ELLAS project faced were both technical and managerial:

  • Fragmented ecosystems with different languages, vocabularies, policies and granularity made it difficult to create uniform processes for data collection, cleaning, and search and ensure sufficient data quality
  • Lack of technical knowledge and experience with SPARQL and RDF tools of policymakers made it difficult to interact with the platform 
  • The diverse academic and research backgrounds (for example, Computing, Education, Social Sciences, Business, Economics, and Psychology) of the responsible teams made the managerial environment demanding

The Solution

The team chose to use GraphDB to integrate and centralize all the data from countries like Brazil, Bolivia and Peru. 

The knowledge graph included:

  • Validating and ensuring data quality using SHACL
  • Ingesting, transforming, and validating unstructured data from 40+ sources (for example, academic papers, gray literature, and surveys)
  • Collecting structured data from online open data sources
  • Mapping spreadsheet data to ontologies
  • Building custom pipelines with Phyton and Petaho for ingesting structured and unstructured data 

The Impact

“The scalable architecture and friendly interface of GraphDB make it ideal for social impact projects like ELLAS. It supports integration with Python and other tools with a quick learning curve—crucial for teams without major funding but with meaningful societal missions.”

Rodgers Fritoli (Researcher) & Prof. Rita C. G. Berardi, Ph.D (Supervisor)

Though still in progress, the ELLAS platform is already delivering significant outcomes:

  • User-friendly front-end interface for non-technical users to search and visualize data
  • Centralization of data coming from 3 pilot countries with plans for regional expansion
  • Improved visibility of policies and initiatives otherwise not recognized in the context of women in STEM
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Details

Solution: GraphDB
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Facing Similar Challenges?

Struggling to unify scattered, messy datasets for policy, advocacy, or public transparency?

Whether you're a policy organization, NGO, research consortium, or public institution, Graphwise can help you:

  • Integrate structured and unstructured data from dozens of sources
  • Validate and standardize information with minimal technical overhead
  • Create transparent, user-friendly tools for public accountability and advocacy

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