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subclopedia: In general research activities involve different concepts, definitions, ideas and categories, that belong to different areas of knowledge. A subclopedia is the subset of an encyclopedia that encloses such concepts. Imagine it is possible to isolate the articles that are relevant for a person or group in regards to his/their work and interests, and put them together in a single volume. The result could be a brand new compendium of interdisciplinary knowledge.
We believe that in the near future people in general smaller communities (such as groups of researchers working on a particular branch of science), will find useful, even urgent, to create their own subclopedias. To create a subclopedia is basically to identify, classify and share a set of articles, papers and definitions that fit the best as possible with the information is needed and used. This compendium is more than a pile of links or texts, it is also an ontological entity and rich structured metadata information for the research. Take, for instance, the collection of tags obtained from the individual articles: you have tagged the entire investigation.
Bestiaro’s research on Wikipedia: Since January 2007 we have been selecting articles on wikipedia.org, according to our interests and necessities. The selection criteria is defined by the projects we have developed or are considering for future development. Interactive visualization is a practice that is equally related with art, science and technology. At the same time, the new science of networks, which is one of our strongest interests and main fields of work, is itself devoted to interdisciplinarity. This is because it establishes structural relations between diverse realities such as quantum mechanics, social networks, galaxies formation and dynamics, citation networks, popular tales, human migrations, internet, ecosystems, brains structure, language evolution… Such diverse contexts, and many others, represent significant challenges in terms of data visualizations as a whole –- from collecting data, to create an immersive experience of understanding and knowledge.
We believe that the large heterogeneity of projects in which Bestiario has been involved over the past couple of years, makes it worthwhile taking a look at our subclopedia’s structure. We have created the first interactive visualization that deploys its temporal structure, showing how new articles have been added to the collection, and how the relevance of different tags were changing among time.
Research Flow: Tagging is a process which reveals interesting patterns in time. The way in which a single tag is used in time defines a rhythm. But tags are related, and it is interesting to compare the chronological behaviour of two or more of them (take art and science, for instance). The flow of tags and the appearance of new ones, give an idea of how interests change over time.
This project is a map of our research from a chronological point of view. It allows to see the tagging behaviour in any given time interval. It is possible to see which articles were added to the subclopedia in any date, and how these additions modify the tag distribution.
