VOSON System - web-based software for the collection and analysis of online network data; incorporates web mining, data visualisation, and social network analysis (SNA).
VOSON Data Provider for NodeXL - a plugin for NodeXL (Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel), which is a template for Excel 2007. VOSON+NodeXL allows VOSON account holders users to access VOSON System functionality (data collection and processing) from within NodeXL. Alpha version released February 2010.
VOSON SNSLab - a
Acyclic digraphs arise in many natural and artificial processes. Among the broader set, dynamic citation networks represent a substantively important form of acyclic digraphs. For example, the study of such networks includes the spread of ideas through academic citations, the spread of innovation through patent citations, and the development of precedent in common law systems. The specific dynamics that produce such acyclic digraphs not only differentiate them from other classes of graphs, but also provide guidance for meaningful distance measures for these networks. We apply our sink based distance measure and the single-linkage hierarchical clustering algorithm to the first quarter century of decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Despite applying the simplest distance measure and a straight forward clustering algorithm, qualitative analysis reveals that accurate clusterings are produced by this scheme.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published Tuesday a landmark paper entitled "Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain" (an open-access paper) by Dharmendra S. Modha (IBM Almaden) and Raghavendra Singh (IBM Research-India) with major implications for reverse-engineering the brain and developing a network of cognitive-computing chips. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman)
NSF's Cyber-Network Now Expands Across the Northern Hemisphere and Connects Half the Globe
GLORIAD's Taj Network opens new horizons for U.S. scientists, educators and students from South Asia to North Pole
Description: "The focus of this project was on computer-mediated or computational scientific knowledge discovery, taken broadly as any research processes enabled by digital computing technologies. Such technologies may include data mining, information retrieval and extraction, artificial intelligence, distributed grid computing, and others. These technological capabilities support computer-mediated knowledge discovery, which some believe is a new paradigm in the conduct of research. The emphasis was primarily on digitally networked data, rather than on the scientific, technical, and medical literature. The meeting also focused mostly on the advantages of knowledge discovery in open networked environments, although some of the disadvantages were raised as well."
Bibliometric and usage-based analyses and tools highlight the value of information about scholarship contained within the network of authors, articles and usage data. Less progress has been made on populating and using the author side of this network than the article side, in part because of the difficulty of unambiguously identifying authors. I briefly review a sample of author identifier schemes, and consider use in scholarly repositories. I then describe preliminary work at arXiv to implement public author identifiers, services based on them, and plans to make this information
A grant proposal was submitted to build a Facebook for scientists to foster scientific collaboration. Such a social network could connect experts across scientific and geographic borders to promote collaboration on research projects.
This report points out a major issue for researchers: it is often easy to FIND the content they need (through Web of Science or Google or PubMed) but it is difficult to ACCESS it. "The content is not available online (either through failure to be digitised or lack of licence purchasing) and licences for
online content are seen to be too complex and sometimes restrictive of access for non-members of institutions; and institutions lack the technical and administrative capacity to overcome these issues."
from the abstract: "assessing the influence of spatial proximity between scientists is crucial to promote efficient collaboration strategies and, ultimately, to improve the quality of science. Here we present a systematic analysis of citation and collaboration streams between cities and countries. By assigning papers to the geographic locations of their authors' affiliations, we construct weighted networks of citations and collaborations. The citation flows as well as the collaboration strengths between cities decrease with the distance between them and follow gravity laws with exponents close to 1. Moreover, for a given number of authors, the diversity of affiliations increases the number of citations, especially when many countries are represented. In addition, the total research impact of a country grows linearly with the amount of national funding for research & development. However, the average impact reveals a peculiar threshold effect: the scientific output of a country may reach an impact larger than the world average only if the country invests more than 120,000 US $ per researcher annually. Our results reveal the overall structure of scientific research by showing the correlation between collaboration, citation, geography and funding, and could provide valuable inputs in shaping the future science policies."
In an edited excerpt from his new book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explains how the massive amounts of data necessary to deal with complex phenomena exceed any single brain's ability to grasp, yet networked science rolls on.
Are you a researcher, asking yourself "What is the difference between grid computing, supercomputing, cloud computing, volunteer computing and everything else? How do I know what is the right tool to use for my work?" If so, then attend the upcoming online discussion hosted by iSGTW - the weekly online computing magazine sponsored by Open Science Grid and the European Grid Initiative - called "Roundtable Q&A: Choose and use the right computing tool for your research, with feedback from the experts."
A Pew presentation documents the ubiquity of mobile technology and social networking and how libraries can use it to their advantage and even rethink their focus (thanks to Garrett Eastman). Useful charts showing the penetration of mobile and broadband internationally, together with any data on teens and adults information behavior.
Elsevier Enriches Articles With Research Data Sets
Elsevier and PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) announced their next step in interconnecting the diverse elements of scientific research. Elsevier articles at ScienceDirect are now enriched with graphical information linking to associated research data sets that are deposited at PANGAEA.
LexiURL Searcher automatically analyses the impact of collections of documents or web sites, and creates network diagrams of collections of web sites. It automatically submits queries to search engines and process the results.