Abstract
BackgroundThe 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.ResultsHEALTH 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.ConclusionsPubMed 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.
Highlights
Commercial search engines, along with related search methods integrated into information repositories such as PubMed, have revolutionized information retrieval; but, for many real-world challenges they solve only part of the problem
GeoJunction Design & Implementation we introduce HEALTH GeoJunction, a highly interactive geovisual analytics-enabled web application designed to assist health researchers, analysts, and policy-makers in finding and contextualizing scientific publications relevant to their needs
HEALTH GeoJunction implements web services that apply computational reasoning methods to support information extraction tasks; these tasks include determining places documents are about and supporting query-by-example to find documents that are most similar to any determined to be of particular interest
Summary
Commercial search engines, along with related search methods integrated into information repositories such as PubMed, have revolutionized information retrieval; but, for many real-world challenges they solve only part of the problem. MacEachren et al International Journal of Health Geographics 2010, 9:23 http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/9/1/23 enza" OR "avian flu" OR "bird flu"), (b) enable analysts to formulate initial potentially productive queries based on that overview, (c) support query revision and narrowing to find documents of interest quickly, and (d) visually represent some of the place, time, and concept relationships within the focused subset of documents identified. These strategies are implemented in HEALTH GeoJunction, an application that provides coordinated computational methods for processing text and visual methods for understanding and interacting with space-time-attribute components of information. The primary goals of GIR are to locate documents that are geographically relevant to user queries, to find and interpret geographical references in unstructured text, and to map the document's geographical footprint (the locations for which the document is relevant) as well as the locations of specific entities extracted from the documents [1]
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