Exploring the Research Utility of Fan-Created Data in the Japanese Visual Media Domain

Researchers wishing to study the Japanese visual media domain do not currently have access to a large set of descriptive data for analysis. To remedy this, the Japanese Visual Media Graph project (JVMG) seeks to build a knowledge graph consisting of descriptive metadata sourced from various online fan communities, described using RDF ontologies. To better understand how this informal, crowdsourced data can be both described using a formal ontologies, and made useful to researchers, this paper presents a summary of the properties of community data from a number of fan sites, and discusses the impact it has on the creation of a unified dataset and on possible research use cases. We find that the data sources are of high quality and coverage. They complement each other well and our central ontology should enable these connections between related resources across communities. Certain niche research topics are enabled by the use of community created data alone, but others encourage the incorporation of additional authoritative sources.