nodalpoint.org - New Life Science Literature Browser - Comments

Biolicious

ionchannels — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 11:00:58 -0500

Thanks for the comments Greg and Alf,
I think RSS is a very obvious fit for this tool. I'm a little confused by the different formats, but I suppose RSS2.0 should suffice for most readers. What do you think? I would like to include as much metadata as possible - would I be able to include citation rates etc... in the XML file without breaking the feed? I'm rather new to RSS, but it shouldn't be too difficult to write a script to construct a feed. Thanks again...

Further thoughts

Greg — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:40:02 -0500

I think a sweet spot would be, as you suggest, to add value via community tagging in addition to automated 'intelligent' tagging.

One feature request: feeds for per topic article list sidebar. You can take your pick of Atom or RSS (in its various flavours), one issue that will need to be considered is the serialization of all the citation metadata. Connotea is doing this using RSS 1.0 with a bunch of different vocabularies (see here for an example). Hubmed is providing both Atom and RSS 2.0 (see here for an example) although with less metadata.

facets

alf — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 11:18:36 -0500

I also think it's an interesting approach, particularly as an alternative to faceted navigation (I actually preferred the tag cloud without the numbers added). It's a bit unclear how the list of papers is selected, but it could be a good way to find papers you hadn't noticed before. The method reminds me a bit of the PubMed visualisation that used to be at http://antarcti.ca/, though that just used MeSH headings.

Biolicious

ionchannels — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 10:18:05 -0500

Hi Greg,
Thanks for the comments. I agree that community tagging is important and will be in the future. My only reservation is that the community must be very large for there to be comprehensive tagging, i.e. how many important articles are not tagged in a given community. What Biolicious brings to the table is citation analysis which integrates the opinions of the scientific community (measured via citation rates) with a comprehensive set of literature organized into topics.

That being said, future development plans include allowing users to tag articles themselves to expand the tag base and reduce noise somewhat and in addition, leverage data regarding which tags are most popular and which articles are most viewed either after clicking on a given tag or after being presented with the Gestalt tag cloud.

Cheers, Christian
Biolicious

It is an interesting

Greg — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 03:11:02 -0500

It is an interesting approach, and certainly experimentation in this area is needed. While presenting extracted key words as tag clouds is helpful, this doesn't really leverage the community driven classification of sites like connotea/delicious.

In other words I can see what is considered 'hot' in the overall literature, but not what certain 'sub-sets' of the community consider hot (i.e. by browsing around the links of those who bookmarked the article). Although the approach you use does highlight current trends in the bio-sciences. I noticed (after clicking on proteomics) that the tags for RNA interference where prominent.

Basically this is cool and I look forward to future developments, but my bet is still with community tagging...

New Life Science Literature Browser

ionchannels — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:14:13 -0500

Greetings,
I have been working on a platform to facilitate the browsing of recent literature in specific fields of the life sciences. The platform displays stemmed tags extracted from abstracts and organized as a tag cloud. We have compiled a database of citation frequency for researchers and journals and we use this data to format the tags related to importance (i.e. more highly cited journals and PIs have tags with a larger font size). We are still working on optimizing the database queries, but it is now fully functioning. We are using AJAX callbacks to enhance usability and speed-up the browsing process.