GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.
Int J Health Geogr. 2010 May 18;9:23. doi: 10.1186/1476-072X-9-23.
The 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.
HEALTH 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.
PubMed 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.
健康科学文献的数量正在迅速增加。因此，随着研究领域的不断发展，跟上最新研究进展变得更加困难，而且找到重要的跨领域联系也变得更加困难。当地理位置是文献中报告的研究的一个相关组成部分时，这些任务就更加困难，因为标准的搜索和索引工具在识别文档中的地理焦点方面能力有限或没有能力。本文介绍了 HEALTH GeoJunction，这是一个网络应用程序，支持研究人员快速找到在地理、时间和主题上都相关的科学出版物。
HEALTH GeoJunction 是一个基于地理视觉分析的网络应用程序，提供了以下功能：(a) 使用计算推理方法从文献数据中提取地点-时间-概念信息的网络服务，用于文档；(b) 可视化的地点-时间-概念查询、过滤和上下文工具，适用于文档及其提取内容。本文特别关注可视化的、迭代的、类似方面的地点-时间-概念过滤策略，这些策略允许分析人员快速深入到 PubMed 摘要中的科学发现，并探索地点、时间和概念之间的关系。该方法使分析人员能够：在不知道所有相关查询参数的情况下找到出版物；在多个健康领域的文档中识别未预料到的地理关系；识别针对特定地点的研究的主题重点；注意概念随时间的变化；注意概念强调的地点变化。
PubMed 是由美国国立生物技术信息中心维护的一个包含超过 1900 万篇生物医学摘要和引文的数据库；由于数据库的规模，实现快速过滤是一个重要的贡献。在过滤器中包含地理位置很重要，因为人们对公共卫生中的地理因素的关注正在迅速增加。迭代地点-时间-概念过滤机制的实现使得从数千篇文档中快速有效地缩小搜索范围成为可能，缩小到满足地点-时间-概念约束的一小部分。类似于这样的查询支持创建在不同研究领域之间发现意外联系的潜力。多视图可视化方法支持对文档集合的地点、时间和概念组件的理解，并使比较过滤查询结果与完整的出版物集成为可能。
