Dynamic view: Distribution, evolution and visualization of research areas in computer science

Abstract

It is tedious and error-prone to query search engines manually in order to accumulate a large body of factual information. Search engines retrieve and rank potentially relevant documents for human perusal, but do not extract facts, or fuse information from multiple documents. This paper introduces Dynamic View, a Semantic Web application for researchers to query, browse and visualize distribution and evolution of research areas in computer science. Present and historical web pages of top 20 universities in USA and China are analyzed, and research areas of faculties in computer science are extracted automatically by segmentation based algorithm. Different ontologies of ACM and MST classification systems are combined by SKOS vocabularies, and the classification of research areas is learned from the ACM Digital Library. Query results including numbers of researchers and their locations are visualized in SVG map and animation. Interestingly, great differences of hot topics do exist between the two countries, and the number of researchers in certain areas changed greatly from the year 2000 to 2005. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.