Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Research interests: their dynamics, structures and applications in unifying search and reasoning

  • Published:
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Most scientific publication information, which may reflects scientists’ research interests, is publicly available on the Web. Understanding the characteristics of research interests from previous publications may help to provide better services for scientists in the Web age. In this paper, we introduce some parameters to track the evolution process of research interests, we analyze their structural and dynamic characteristics. According to the observed characteristics of research interests, under the framework of unifying search and reasoning (ReaSearch), we propose interests-based unification of search and reasoning (I-ReaSearch). Under the proposed I-ReaSearch method, we illustrate how research interests can be used to improve literature search on the Web. According to the relationship between an author’s own interests and his/her co-authors interests, social group interests are also used to refine the literature search process. Evaluation from both the user satisfaction and the scalability point of view show that the proposed I-ReaSearch method provides a user centered and practical way to problem solving on the Web. The efforts provide some hints and various methods to support personalized search, and can be considered as a step forward user centric knowledge retrieval on the Web. From the standpoint of the Active Media Technology (AMT) on the Wisdom Web, in this paper, the study on the characteristics of research interests is based on complex networks and human dynamics, which can be considered as an effort towards utilizing information physics to discover and explain the phenomena related to research interests of scientists. The application of research interests aims at providing scientific researchers best means and best ends in an active way for literature search on the Web.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The page was visited in Oct. 17th, 2009. A list of filtered words can be found from http://www.wici-lab.org/wici/dblp-sse/Filterwords.txt.

  2. SwetoDBLP dataset is an RDF version of the DBLP dataset. It can be downloaded from http://knoesis.wright.edu/library/ontologies/swetodblp/.

  3. The RDF version of the DBLP authors’ interests dataset has been released through http://wiki.larkc.eu/csri-rdf.

  4. http://www.wici-lab.org/wici/dblp-sse

References

  • Aleman-Meza, B., Hakimpour, F., Arpinar, I. B., & Sheth, A. P. (2007). Swetodblp ontology of computer science publications. Journal of Web Semantics, 5(3):151–155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, J. R., & Schooler, L. J. (1991). Reflections of the environment in memory. Psychological Science, 2(6), 396–408.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barabási, A. L. (2002). Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for science, business and everyday life (1 ed.). Perseus Publishing.

  • Barabási, A. L. (2005). The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. Nature, 435, 207–211.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berners-Lee, T., & Fischetti, M. (1999). Weaving the web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the world wide web by its inventor. HarperSanFrancisco.

  • Braam, R. R., Moed, H. F., & Raan, A. F. J. v. (1991). Mapping of science by combined co-citation and word analysis: II. Dynamical aspects. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(4), 252–266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academy Press.

  • Chen, C. M. (2006). Citespace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(3), 359–377.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dezso, Z., Almaas, E., Lukács, A., Rácz, B., Szakadát, I., & Barabási, A. L. (2006). Dynamics of information access on the web. Physical Review E, 73(066132), 1–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology hermann ebbinghaus. Teachers College, Columbia University.

  • Erten, C., Harding, P. J., Kobourov, S. G., Wampler, K., & Yee, G. (2004). Exploring the computing literature using temporal graph visualization. In Proceedings of the 2004 SPIE Conference on visualization and data analysis (Vol. 5295, pp. 45–56).

  • Fensel, D., & van Harmelen, F. (2007). Unifying reasoning and search to web scale. IEEE Internet Computing, 11(2), 96, 94–95.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greene, J. H. (1997). Production and inventory control handbook (3 ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haight, F. A. (1967). Handbook of the Poisson distribution. New York: Wiley.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Han, X. P., Zhou, T., & Wang, B. H. (2008). Modeling human dynamics with adaptive interest. New Journal of Physics, 10(073010), 1–8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoeber, O. (2008). Web information retrieval support systems: The future of web search. In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence and intelligent agent technology (Vol. 3, pp. 29–32).

  • Liu, J. M. (2006). Active media technologies (amt) from the standpoint of the wisdom web. In Y. Li, M. Looi, & N. Zhong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th international conference on active media technology (AMT 2006). Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications (Vol. 138, pp. 3–6). IOS Press.

  • Masoliver, J., Montero, M., & Weiss, G. H. (2003). Continuous-time random-walk model for financial distributions. Physical Review E, 67(021112), 1–10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oliveira, J. G., & Barabási, A. L. (2005). Darwin and Einstein correspondence patterns. Nature, 437, 1251.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Popescul, A., Flake, G. W., Lawrence, S., Ungar, L. H., & Giles, C. L. (2000). Clustering and identifying temporal trends in document databases. In Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE advances in digital libraries (pp. 173–182).

  • Qiu, F., & Cho, J. (2006). Automatic identification of user interest for personalized search. In Proceedings of the 2006 international world wide web conference.

  • Reynolds, P. (2003). Call center staffing. Lebanon, Tennessee: The Call Center School Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roy, S., Gevry, D., & Pottenger, W. M. (2002). Methodologies for trend detection in textual data mining. In Proceedings of the 2002 text mining workshop at the second SIAM conference on data mining.

  • Shneiderman, B. (2008). Science 2.0. Science, 319, 1349–1350.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Small, H. G., & Griffith, B. C. (1974). The structure of scientific literatures: I. Identifying and graphing specialties. Science Studies, 4, 17–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yao, Y. Y. (2002). Information retrieval support systems. In Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE international conference on fuzzy systems (pp. 773–778).

  • Yao, J. T., & Yao, Y. Y. (2003). Web-based support systems (reprint from wss’03). In Proceedings of the 2004 international workshop on web-based support systems (pp. 1–5).

  • Yao, Y. Y., Zeng, Y., Zhong, N., & Huang, X.J. (2007). Knowledge retrieval (kr). In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence (pp. 729–735).

  • Zeng, Y., Ren, X., Qin, Y. L., Zhong, N., Huang, Z. S., & Wang, Y. (2009). Social relation based scalable semantic search refinement. In The 1st asian workshop on scalable semantic data processing (AS2DP).

  • Zeng, Y., Yao, Y. Y., Zhong, N. (2009b). Dblp-sse: A dblp search support engine. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence (pp. 626–630).

  • Zeng, Y., Wang, Y., Huang, Z. S., Damljanovic, D., Zhong, N., et al. (2010a) User interests: Definition, vocabulary, and utilization in unifying search and reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on active media technology (pp. 98–107). Springer.

  • Zeng, Y., Zhong, N., Wang, Y., Qin, Y. L., Huang, Z. S., Zhou, H. Y., et al. (2010b). User-centric query refinement and processing using granularity based strategies. Knowledge and Information Systems. doi:10.1007/s10115-010-0298-8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zeng, Y., Zhou, E. Z., Qin, Y. L., & Zhong, N. (2010b). Research interests: Their dynamics, structures and applications in web search refinement. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence (pp. 639–646). IEEE Computer Society.

Download references

Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme, Large Knowledge Collider (FP7-215535). The author would like to thank Yiyu Yao for his constructive discussion on user interests based knowledge retrieval, Rui Guo and Chao Gao on their useful comments on network theory which are used for interpreting the phenomenon observed in this study, Jian Yang for his suggestions on measurement of research interests.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, People’s Republic of China

    Yi Zeng, Erzhong Zhou, Yan Wang, Xu Ren & Yulin Qin

  2. Division of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Zhisheng Huang

  3. Department of Life Science and Informatics, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Maebashi-City, 371-0816, Japan

    Ning Zhong

Authors
  1. Yi Zeng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Erzhong Zhou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Yan Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Xu Ren
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Yulin Qin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Zhisheng Huang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Ning Zhong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yi Zeng.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Zeng, Y., Zhou, E., Wang, Y. et al. Research interests: their dynamics, structures and applications in unifying search and reasoning. J Intell Inf Syst 37, 65–88 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-010-0144-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-010-0144-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation