Open Knowledge Maps – A visual interface to the world's scientific knowledge | Hacker News Reader

Open Knowledge Maps – A visual interface to the world's scientific knowledge

openknowledgemaps.org

73 pointsalbertzeyer14 comments

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Interesting idea.

I created a map with the keyword "information". A few odd categories returned:

- Scientific publishing, Metacognition, Dogs

- Twitter, Nutrition, Socioeconomic aspects of health

- Graphs, Quality of life

(EDIT: formatting)

How do they maintain a useful number of and a high quality for links for each node, without the scalability problems of a human editor?

When I've thought about systems like this one, I always get stuck on that problem. If you automatically create every link between nodes, you end up with terrible signal-to-noise for the user; even 50 links (I'm guessing at a threshhold) seems too many to read through in order to find the one you want, and too many for the user to conceptualize. Imagine how many links there are to nodes like evolution or relativity.

The solutions I can think of:

* Categorize links, so the user can narrow their search

* Rate links by value? Relevance? How do you do this without a human editor?

* Efficient user-created filters for links

* Directional links: e.g., Many nodes may link to relativity, but relativity links to only a few

* Expert human editor, who can identify valuable links, but that wouldn't seem to scale

* Crowd-sourced links, but I would expect quality and signal-to-noise to be too low for serious research

IME, for serious research, nothing automated approaches the value of a professional reference librarian.

Thanks for your comments! The idea is to turn this into a collaborative effort further down the line, involving librarians and the other communities participating in the organisation and exploration of scientific knowledge. Read the full vision here: https://science20.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/its-time-to-chang...

Title seems pretty inaccurate.

I searched "computer", and it came up with some strange results. Poking around a bit, it says it's based on "PLOS", which after jumping through that link and poking around some more it seems to be mostly for biology/medical related fields of research.

Yes, Open Knowledge Maps is currently in the beta and only queries against PLOS which, as you have correctly stated, covers mostly BioMedical topics. But this will hopefully change in the near future and we will be able to cover more fields of research.

We have also currently deployed a simpler algorithm due to performance issues on our server.

This is all very cool, but I'm having trouble figuring out what the visualization actually means. I'm assuming that overlapping bubbles have more in common, but how is that calculated? Just mousing over the bubbles doesn't reveal any immediate connections or shared papers.

The position of the papers and the clusters (bubbles) are determined with NLP techniques based on the fulltexts of the papers.

"Ancient Greek Medicine" got me data about Slavs, Italians, Point Mutation, and Neurotransmitters, but nothing about Ancient Greece?

This is exactly what I'm building! Awesome

Drop us a line, maybe we can join forces!

What's up with the fake progress bar?

Should work again now, please check!

The search time :(

it did not work

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