Visualizing the research profile of an IT Department

The ability of computers to store data is unlimited. As a result, we have at our service as much data as we want, but at the same time emerges the problem of converting them in useful information and knowledge. There are many cases where this information is required to be perceived directly and quickly. The visualization of data is the way to take advantage of the strongest human sense, in order to achieve our goal. Data visualization is the graphical representation of data, aiming to reveal the complex information at a glance. In this paper, the visualization of the research field of four professors of ATEI of Thessaloniki is attempted. The general idea of visualization, as well as the implementations of some real examples, is also presented. For the data mining, the tf-idf weighting scheme is used upon the words of a corpus, for the extraction of the important concepts. The creation of a thesaurus including the interesting concepts, is compulsory. The counting of their occurrences is done by writing a program in Java. Finally, the vector array which is created, together with the thesaurus, forms the input for the VOS viewer, which is a program for creating knowledge domain visualization maps