Contextual annotation of web pages for interactive browsing.

With the information on the World Wide Web and in specialized databases exploding, researchers and physicians are in dire need to browse efficiently though the large corpus of information resources in their field of interest. The focus is not any longer to find everything related to your interest, but it shifts to zooming in, based on context and expanding again in neighboring knowledge domains. This paper describes an attempt to develop a completely new, interactive way of browsing distributed corpora of information without the need for multiple different queries in different information resources. Classical search engines generally treat search requests in isolation. The results for a given query are identical, and do not automatically take on board the context in which the user made the request. The system described here explores implicit contexts as obtained from the document that the user is reading. The new approach merges the searching and browsing into one combined "read-and-search" mode and alleviates the shift users are normally forced to between searching and reading.

Research for research: tools for knowledge discovery and visualization.

This paper describes a method to construct from a set of documents a spatial representation that can be used for information retrieval and knowledge discovery. The proposed method has been implemented in a prototype system and allows the researcher to browse interactively and in real-time a network of relationships obtained from a set of full text articles. These relationships are combined with the potential relationships between concepts as defined in the UMLS semantic network. The browser allows the user to select a seed term and find all related concepts, to find a path between concepts (hypothesis testing), and to retrieve the references to documents or database entries that support the relationship between concepts.