Transcript PaperScope: Visually Exploring the ADS

PaperScope: Visually
Exploring the ADS
Mark Holliman
VOTECH Web Developer
University of Edinburgh
http://paperscope.sourceforge.net
ADASS XVII, London, September 26, 2007
PaperScope
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Summary
Motivation behind PaperScope
 Graph Description and Screenshots
 Future Improvements
 Software Design
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ADASS XVII, London, September 26, 2007
Motivation
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The Goal: To improve the method used by
Astrophysics researchers for searching the ADS
to locate papers of interest
The Problem: ADS results are returned in a text
format that is useful for individual queries but is
difficult to use in constructing reference or
citation chains
The Solution: Provide researchers with a
graphical method for searching the ADS
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Must be intuitive to use
Paper relationships should be clearly indicated
Search tools should be simple
ADASS XVII, London, September 26, 2007
Solution: PaperScope
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PaperScope is a standalone application built for
graphically exploring the ADS
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Provides tools for graphing ADS search results into a
2D graph of nodes (papers) and edges (relationships)
all in real time
The graph can be expanded by querying the ADS for
reference or citation lists (or both) for a chosen paper
The graph can be searched and manipulated to
locate papers of interest
A graph can be saved to a file for later use or for
distribution
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Initial Search
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Initial Graph
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Graph Color Scheme
- Focus Paper
- Reference Paper
- Citation Paper
- Highlighted Paper
- Citation Highlight
ADASS XVII, London, September 26, 2007
Exploring the Graph
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Expanding the Graph
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Filtering the Graph
Main Uses
Researching reference and citation chains
for a particular paper
 Identifying common (i.e. important)
references for papers in a particular field
 Sharing lists of papers with others,
including your comments about them, in a
useable format
 Discovering other authors who commonly
cite your own work, or the work of another
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Future Improvements
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Plasticize – Make PaperScope Plastic enabled for
communicating with other Astronomy software
(VOExplorer in particular)
 Enables users to go from reading a paper to finding
online data/tools from that paper all with only a few
mouse clicks
Improve query formation and result sorting capabilities
Implement tree-style layout to use alongside the graph
Improve graph look and feel, and add new tools for
searching and manipulating the graph
Release backwards compatible version for Java 1.5
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Software Design
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Programmed in Java
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Swing GUI
Graph is built using Prefuse (www.prefuse.org)
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Utilizes standard HTTP access to ADS
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Open Source visualization Java library
Uses an XML based backend data structure
Easy to implement, and highly customizable
Retrieves query results as XML
Translates results into Java object array, then into the GraphML
format used by Prefuse
Randomly chooses an ADS mirror for each query to avoid
overloading a single site
Search tool uses the Apache Lucene search engine
(http://lucene.apache.org)
BrowserLauncher2
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Download Software
 http://paperscope.sourceforge.net/
Download PaperScope 1.0 (requires Java
1.6)
 Report Bugs
 Request Features
 User Manual and Walkthrough
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ADASS XVII, London, September 26, 2007