TY - JOUR
T1 - HEALTH GeoJunction
T2 - Place-time-concept browsing of health publications
AU - MacEachren, Alan M.
AU - Stryker, Michael S.
AU - Turton, Ian J.
AU - Pezanowski, Scott
N1 - Funding Information:
The approach to document filtering and exploration presented, is also not limited to health documents. The current implementation is tuned to work with PubMed abstracts and to take advantage of information contained in MeSH headings. But, the overall facet-based, time-place-concept document filtering approach is a generic one that is potentially applicable to any documents. Of course, for documents that do not contain an explicit distinction between the location a document is from or about, there is an added challenge to distinguish among those two kinds of place. Our current implementation does not include capabilities to do that, but we believe the current implementation is easily generalizable to any formal publications that cite the affiliation of authors and mention places in the content. We are currently assessing this contention with an extension of the system to support filtering and exploration of grant abstracts from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (grant # EIA-0306845) and by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Award Number: 2009-ST-061-CI0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. All decisions about the research (study design, software implementation) and about this publication were the responsibility of the authors and are not intended to reflect views of the research sponsors.
PY - 2010/5/18
Y1 - 2010/5/18
N2 - Background: The volume of health science publications is escalating rapidly. Thus, keeping up with developments is becoming harder as is the task of finding important cross-domain connections. When geographic location is a relevant component of research reported in publications, these tasks are more difficult because standard search and indexing facilities have limited or no ability to identify geographic foci in documents. This paper introduces HEALTH GeoJunction, a web application that supports researchers in the task of quickly finding scientific publications that are relevant geographically and temporally as well as thematically.Results: HEALTH GeoJunction is a geovisual analytics-enabled web application providing: (a) web services using computational reasoning methods to extract place-time-concept information from bibliographic data for documents and (b) visually-enabled place-time-concept query, filtering, and contextualizing tools that apply to both the documents and their extracted content. This paper focuses specifically on strategies for visually-enabled, iterative, facet-like, place-time-concept filtering that allows analysts to quickly drill down to scientific findings of interest in PubMed abstracts and to explore relations among abstracts and extracted concepts in place and time. The approach enables analysts to: find publications without knowing all relevant query parameters, recognize unanticipated geographic relations within and among documents in multiple health domains, identify the thematic emphasis of research targeting particular places, notice changes in concepts over time, and notice changes in places where concepts are emphasized.Conclusions: PubMed is a database of over 19 million biomedical abstracts and citations maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information; achieving quick filtering is an important contribution due to the database size. Including geography in filters is important due to rapidly escalating attention to geographic factors in public health. The implementation of mechanisms for iterative place-time-concept filtering makes it possible to narrow searches efficiently and quickly from thousands of documents to a small subset that meet place-time-concept constraints. Support for a more-like-this query creates the potential to identify unexpected connections across diverse areas of research. Multi-view visualization methods support understanding of the place, time, and concept components of document collections and enable comparison of filtered query results to the full set of publications.
AB - Background: The volume of health science publications is escalating rapidly. Thus, keeping up with developments is becoming harder as is the task of finding important cross-domain connections. When geographic location is a relevant component of research reported in publications, these tasks are more difficult because standard search and indexing facilities have limited or no ability to identify geographic foci in documents. This paper introduces HEALTH GeoJunction, a web application that supports researchers in the task of quickly finding scientific publications that are relevant geographically and temporally as well as thematically.Results: HEALTH GeoJunction is a geovisual analytics-enabled web application providing: (a) web services using computational reasoning methods to extract place-time-concept information from bibliographic data for documents and (b) visually-enabled place-time-concept query, filtering, and contextualizing tools that apply to both the documents and their extracted content. This paper focuses specifically on strategies for visually-enabled, iterative, facet-like, place-time-concept filtering that allows analysts to quickly drill down to scientific findings of interest in PubMed abstracts and to explore relations among abstracts and extracted concepts in place and time. The approach enables analysts to: find publications without knowing all relevant query parameters, recognize unanticipated geographic relations within and among documents in multiple health domains, identify the thematic emphasis of research targeting particular places, notice changes in concepts over time, and notice changes in places where concepts are emphasized.Conclusions: PubMed is a database of over 19 million biomedical abstracts and citations maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information; achieving quick filtering is an important contribution due to the database size. Including geography in filters is important due to rapidly escalating attention to geographic factors in public health. The implementation of mechanisms for iterative place-time-concept filtering makes it possible to narrow searches efficiently and quickly from thousands of documents to a small subset that meet place-time-concept constraints. Support for a more-like-this query creates the potential to identify unexpected connections across diverse areas of research. Multi-view visualization methods support understanding of the place, time, and concept components of document collections and enable comparison of filtered query results to the full set of publications.
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U2 - 10.1186/1476-072X-9-23
DO - 10.1186/1476-072X-9-23
M3 - Article
C2 - 20482806
AN - SCOPUS:77952278913
SN - 1476-072X
VL - 9
JO - International Journal of Health Geographics
JF - International Journal of Health Geographics
M1 - 23
ER -