DocGenealogy – Visualizing the doctoral advisors and mentors genealogic tree

David Paiva Fernandes ,Elizabeth Carvalho

doi:10.5752/p.2316-9451.2018v6n2p3-20

Abstract

DocGenealogy is a data mining project that allows the visualization and exploration of the doctoral advisement/mentoring relationship through an interactive graph chart. Wikipedia is known for its informal collaborative nature, based on a somewhat loose and non-structural way of producing information, and one of its strengths is, in fact, the openness to all sorts of collaborations. DocGenealogy uses the Wikipedia available data on doctoral advisement and mentoring to find out and track the existing relationships between advisors or mentors and their students. The data mining process starting point is always some well-known scientist. This process continues until finding all the ultimate reputed co-related advisors and mentors, and builds iteratively the relationship graph. Besides this, DocGenealogy also visually shows how people are distributed by alma mater and field of knowledge. The main objective of the work is to evaluate the effectiveness of the graph-oriented techniques in the interpretation of data from Wilipedia infoboxes.

Highlights

Information visualization is concerned with exploiting the cognitive capabilities of human visual perception in order to convey meaningful patterns and trends hidden in abstract datasets (MOERE et al, 2012)
Wikipedia is known for its informal collaborative nature, based on a somewhat loose and non-structural way of producing information, and one of its strengths is, the openness to all sorts of collaborations
DocGenealogy visually shows how people are distributed by alma mater and field of knowledge

Summary

INTRODUÇÃO

Information visualization (InfoVis), the study of transforming data, information, and knowledge into interactive visual representations, is very important to users because it provides mental models of information. DocGenealogy is a web-based application that allows discovering the existing relationship between doctoral advisers and mentors along the time. It offers an interactive dynamic force-direct node-link diagram to assist end-users on this task, besides other charts to support a better information insight. The rest of the article is structured as follows: we will first point out the scientific background to this work, with a special focus on visual techniques used to visually map graphs, and we will describe the DocGenealogy conceptual model and its prototype, including its data model, source, design, and technology. We will discuss the main conclusions and outputs, besides future works to be developed

BACKGROUND

DOCGENEALOGY PROTOTYPE

Technology

Visualization

Findings

MAIN CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK