How can heat maps of indexing vocabularies be utilized for information seeking purposes?

The ability to browse an information space in a structured way by exploiting similarities and dissimilarities between information objects is crucial for knowledge discovery. Knowledge maps use visualizations to gain insights into the structure of large-scale information spaces, but are still far away from being applicable for searching. The paper proposes a use case for enhancing search term recommendations by heat map visualizations of co-word relation-ships taken from indexing vocabulary. By contrasting areas of different "heat" the user is enabled to indicate mainstream areas of the field in question more easily.Comment: URL workshop proceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1311

Assessing Educational Research -- An Information Service for Monitoring a Heterogeneous Research Field

The paper presents a web prototype that visualises different characteristics of research projects in the heterogeneous domain of educational research. The concept of the application derives from the project "Monitoring Educational Research" (MoBi) that aims at identifying and implementing indicators that adequately describe structural properties and dynamics of the research field. The prototype enables users to visualise data regarding different indicators, e.g. "research activity", "funding", "qualification project", "disciplinary area". Since the application is based on Semantic MediaWikitechnology it furthermore provides an easily accessible opportunity to collaboratively work on a database of research projects. Users can jointly and in a semantically controlled way enter metadata on research projects which are the basis for the computation and visualisation of indicators.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, Libraries in the digital age (LIDA) 2014 conferenc