Question about using SemOpenAlex as a replacement for MAKG

[stancuem]

Hello developers,

First of all, thank you very much for your great work on SemOpenAlex and for making such a powerful and open scholarly knowledge graph available to the community!

At our university, we recently faced an unfortunate situation — we lost our local installation of the Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph (MAKG). Since it appears that MAKG is unlikely to be restored, we are now looking for options to rebuild our infrastructure.

After studying your paper "SemOpenAlex: The Scientific Landscape in 26 Billion RDF Triples", I have a few questions:

1. As I understand it, SemOpenAlex was designed as an RDF-based, Linked Open Data-compliant alternative to MAKG, including similar entity types (works, authors, institutions, concepts, etc.) and even some links back to MAKG. Am I correct in this interpretation?
2. Is it realistic to use SemOpenAlex as a replacement for MAKG for applications that were originally based on the MAKG schema, or are there significant schema and data modeling differences that would require adapting our existing parsers and tools?
3. In your opinion, would it be possible to reconstruct a database similar to MAKG's structure based on SemOpenAlex?

I would greatly appreciate any advice, clarifications, or recommendations you could provide!
Thank you again for your hard work and for making SemOpenAlex openly available.

Best regards,
Nikita
PhD Student, Bauman Moscow State Technical University