TOWARDS INFORMATIONAL SCIENCE Indexing and Analyzing the Knowledge of Scientific Communities

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TOWARDS INFORMATIONAL SCIENCE Indexing and
Analyzing theKnowledge of Scientific Communities
Bruce R. Schatz CANIS LaboratoryGraduate School
of Library and Information ScienceUniversity of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign www.canis.uiuc.edu,
schatz_at_uiuc.edu
Workshop on The Transformation of Science Max
Planck Society, Elmau, Germany June 1, 1999
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Informational Science

• Towards the Fourth Branch of Science
• Computer Science gt Computational Science
• Information Science gt Informational Science
• Correlation of Knowledge across Sources
• Distributed Community Repositories
• Semantic Indexing of Community Knowledge
• Analysis Environments on the Net

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The Distributed World

• Community Repositories in the Interspace
• Every Person performs Every Role

USER request LIBRARIAN reference INDEXER class
ify PUBLISHER quality AUTHOR generate
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Community Systems
results
data
(database management)
(electronic mail)
knowledge
(hypertext annotations)
literature
news
(information retrieval)
(bulletin boards)
Formal
Informal
browse and share all the knowledge of a community
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Worm Community System

• WCS Information
• Literature BIOSIS, MEDLINE, newsletters,
  meetings
• Data Genes, Maps, Sequences, strains, people
• WCS Functionality
• Browsing search, navigation
• Filtering selection, analysis
• Sharing linking, publishing
• WCS 250 users at 50 labs across Internet (1991)

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WCS
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THE THIRD WAVE OF NET EVOLUTION
CONCEPTS
OBJECTS
PACKETS
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CONCEPT SPACES

• from Objects to Concepts
• from Syntax to Semantics
• Infrastructure is Interaction with Abstraction

Internet is packet transmission across
computers Interspace is concept navigation
across repositories
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LEVELS OF INDEXES
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SCALABLE SEMANTICS

• Automatic indexing
• Domain-Independent indexing
• Statistical clustering
• Compute Context of
• concepts within documents
• documents within repositories

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CROSS-OVERS IN SEMANTIC INDEXING
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COMPUTING CONCEPTS
92 4,000 (molecular biology) 93 40,000
(molecular biology) 95 400,000 (electrical
engineering) 96 4,000,000 (engineering) 98
40,000,000 (medicine)
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SIMULATING A NEW WORLD

• Obtain discipline-scale collection
• MEDLINE from NLM, 10M bibliographic abstracts
• human classification Medical Subject Headings
• Partition discipline into Community Repositories
• 4 core terms per abstract for MeSH classification
• 32K nodes with core terms (classification tree)
• Community is all abstracts classified by core
  term
• 40M abstracts containing 280M concepts
• concept spaces took 2 days on NCSA Origin 2000
• Simulating World of Medical Communities
• 10K repositories with gt 1K abstracts (1K w/ gt
  10K)

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COMMUNITY PROCESSING
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INTERSPACE NAVIGATION

• Semantic Indexes for Community Repositories
• Navigating Abstractions within Repository
• concept space
• category map
• Interactive browsing by Community experts

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Interspace Remote Access Client
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Navigation in MEDSPACE

• For a patient with Rheumatoid Arthritis
• Find a drug that reduces the pain (analgesic)
• but does not cause stomach (gastrointestinal)
  bleeding

Choose Domain
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Concept Search
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Concept Navigation
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Retrieve Document
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Navigate Document
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Retrieve Document
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(No Transcript)
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Category Map
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Category Navigation
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Concept Navigation
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SWITCHING

• In the Interspace
• each Community maintains its own repository
• Switching is navigating Across repositories
• use your vocabulary to search another specialty

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Medicine Session
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Categories and Concepts
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Concept Switching
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Document Retrieval
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CONCEPT SWITCHING

• Concept versus Term
• set of semantically equivalent terms
• Concept switching
• region to region (set to set) match

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Building Your Interspace

• Gather the Information Sources
• external bibliographic and community documents
• community meta-data and specialty data
• Generate the Community Repositories
• concept spaces (terms) category maps
  (documents)
• Construct the Analysis Environment
• concept switching and community links
• Evolve Community Interspace
• concept navigation and object sharing

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THE NET OF THE 21st CENTURY

• Beyond Objects to Concepts
• Beyond Search to Analysis
• Every Community has its own special library
• Every Community does semantic indexing
• Problem Solving via Cross-Correlating
• Concepts Across the Interspace

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The Zen of the Net