Projects / Programmes
Co-authorship networks of slovenian scholars: Theoretical analysis and visualization user interface development
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 7.00.00 |
Interdisciplinary research |
|
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| P160 |
Natural sciences and mathematics |
Statistics, operations research, programming, actuarial mathematics |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 1.02 |
Natural Sciences |
Computer and information sciences |
statistics, operations research, programming, actuarial mathematics, graph theory, large networks analysis
Researchers (20)
Organisations (3)
Abstract
There are two information systems designed for storing and reviewing data on scientific and research work in the Republic of Slovenia (RS). The SICRIS database contains information on individual researchers, research groups, research organizations and research programs and projects (hereinafter referred to as research subject), the COBISS database contains information of scientific publications of all registered researchers in the RS. The databases allow tracking of research achievements; however, they are often inadequate for analytics and do not offer a complex insight into the structure, recognition and performance of each research subject. In addition, they lack (i) the advanced tools for analyzing the efficiency of individual research subject, (ii) a user-friendly interface for interactive visualization, and (iii) a semantic search using content based search techniques.
The main objective of this project is to merge scientific research data and bibliographic data of individual research subjects from accessible resources into a user-friendly web application. The application would allow exploratory data analysis, data mining and visualization of complex relational data to registered researchers, institutions of national government, non-governmental organizations, and members of the public interested in it.
The stated research problem consists of three main parts: (i) the integration of scientific research data and bibliographic data, (ii) the development and implementation of methods and algorithms for the analysis and visualization of network data structures and texts, and (iii) the analysis and evaluation of a theoretical model for generating random networks, based on the Kronecker product of adjacent matrices.
The main objective of the project is the development and implementation of a free, publicly available web application, offering: (i) the integration of information from relevant data sources (SICRIS, COBISS, and Google Scholar), (ii) cleaning, converting, disambiguation and integration of retrieved data, (iii) a complex analysis of network and selected subnetworks of research subjects at present and over time, (iv) a complex analysis of texts related to the selected research subjects at present and over time, and (v) an interactive data analysis and visualization.
The project team leader and other members of the proposed project team have advanced scientific references in the fields of graph theory, network and text analysis, network visualization, semantic technologies and knowledge technologies. The performance and the quality of performance of the proposed project are therefore not questionable. The work on the proposed project will take place within five interrelated work packages, which include the specific tasks required for its successful realization. The results of the proposed project will be published in highly ranked scientific journals in the form of several scientific papers. Further on, the results of the work will be regularly presented at international scientific conferences. The successful completion of the proposed project will significantly contribute to a further breakthrough of Slovenian scientists in the field of network analysis worldwide. Indirectly, our results will also contribute to the consolidation of new research areas, such as relational data mining, semantic data mining and text mining.
Significance for science
Recently, network analysis has become an important tool in attempts to understand complex systems, which are impossible to explain by simply observing each element separately, due to large amount of data they are comprised of. Network analysis successfully combines different branches of science, starting with graph theory as the foundation, through theoretical computer science to physics and further to biology, microbiology all the way to social sciences. The results of the project thus directly affect the development of science in our country. Network analysis is also an effective tool for detecting (atypical) patterns that may occur in networks. In this way, for example, it is easy to observe researchers from different science fields and how they are connected, the dynamics of the network development over time - disadvantages of different branches of science and their growth. The tools we developed make the construction of various scientific networks much simpler, so a significantly bigger number of analyzes can now be performed by research groups. Due to simplified parametrization of network construction by using different entities and filters, one can construct a set of structurally different networks, allowing for testing the performance of algorithms on real networks with different characteristics.
Significance for the country
The developed system provides an insight into the work and cooperation of researchers and in this way contributes to transparency and stimulation of cooperation. Given the high degree of interdisciplinarity, the funding distribution by disciplines is a hard task. By analyzing the communities in collaborative networks of researchers one could introduce additional criteria for distribution, and new policies for scientific funding based on evaluations of performance may be proposed. Additionally, the system also allows network visualization of research groups, through which it is easy to determine which researchers or research groups in Slovenia are involved in a specific area of science.
Most important scientific results
Annual report
2012,
2013,
final report,
complete report on dLib.si
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Annual report
2012,
2013,
final report,
complete report on dLib.si
