Combining mining and visualization tools to discover the geographic structure of a domain

Science monitoring is a core issue in the new world of business and research. Companies and institutes need to monitor the activities of their competitors, get information on the market, changing technologies or government policies. This paper presents the Tetralogie platform that is aimed at allowing a user to interactively discover trends in scientific research and communities from large textual collections that include information about geographical location. Tetralogie consists of several agents that communicate with each other on users' demands in order to deliver results to them. Metadata and document content are extracted before being mined. Results are displayed in the form of histograms, networks and geographical maps; these complementary types of presentations increase the possibilities of analysis compared to the use of these tools separately. We illustrate the overall process through a case study of scientific literature analysis and show how the different agents can be combined to discover the structure of a domain. The system correctly predicts the country contribution to a field in future years and allows exploration of the relationships between countries. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.