This paper presents a creativity support tool, called FreePub, to collect and organize scientific material using mindmaps. Mindmaps are visual, graph-based represenations of concepts, ideas, notes, tasks, etc. They generally take a hierarchical or tree branch format, with ideas branching into their subsections. FreePub supports creativity cycles. A user starts such a cycle by setting up her domain of interest using mindmaps. Then, she can browse mindmaps and launch search tasks to gather relevant publications from several data sources. FreePub, besides publications, identifies helpful supporting material (e.g., blog posts, presentations). All retrieved information from FreePub can be imported and organized in mindmaps. FreePub has been fully implemented on top of FreeMind, a popular open-source, mindmapping tool.
Web search engines are widely used for searching information on the Web. Their increased popularity is due to the following reasons: the search model employed (i.e., keyword-based) is simple and easy to use, and the search techniques are nowadays mature enough to support fast text retrieval with accurate results.
However, there are use cases where the information need is complex. Consider, for instance, a researcher that needs to set up her research agenda and generate innovative ideas. She often has the “big picture” of the domain, i.e., an abstraction based on topics, thoughts, and everything else that helps setting up her search plan to explore the domain. Based on this initial abstraction, she (a) gathers information from several data sources, (b) organizes the information, (c) generates hypothesis and scientific results, (c) disseminates those results, and then (d) starts over by refining her abstraction and search plan. Such a creativity cycle actually enables discovery and innovation.
To illustrate an example of a creativity cycle, consider a researcher interested in sequence matching techniques for genomics, and the following use case: 1. The researcher starts by looking for journal papers that make a thorough review of this particular research area (i.e., the so-called survey papers), and blog articles that provide a review of the current state-of-the-art technologies technologies. 2. After organizing and studying the retrieved material, she pays more attention to the local alignment problem, that is “given a query sequence and a data sequence, find pairs of similar subsequences chosen from these sequences”. She finds out that the dynamic programming solutions suggested to deal with that problem have high computational cost, and that this is the reason for researchers to work on approximation solutions (i.e., methods to return some but not all of the alignment results, according to some statistical significance model). Thus, she starts now looking for papers related to approximate local alignment. 3. After organizing and studying the retrieved material, she concludes that those methods, athough efficient, are not appropriate for several cases where the full result set of alignments is needed. Thus, she starts now looking for papers that are related to indexing schemes for efficient local alinment. These approaches exploit data structures which speed up the matching process between a large data sequences and a query sequence, at the expense of having to maintain these structures when data changes. 4. At any step of the above creativity cycle, she disseminate her findings to other researchers to get feedback.
New search models and techniques are necessary to support creativity and innovation [21]. A critical objective is to support creativity cycles, and also to provide effective presentation and visualization capabilities for the lists of retrieved resources that will guide users during their search and exploration.
Mindmapping [
This paper presents a creativity support tool, called FreePub, to collect and organize scientific material using mindmaps. FreePub supports creativity cycles, assisting users to: 1. set up their domain of interest using mindmaps, 2. browse mindmaps and launch search tasks to gather relevant documents from several data sources, 3. identify supporting material for those documents (e.g., blog posts, presentations), and 4. import and organise all retrieved information in mindmaps.
FreePub (http://web.imis.athena-innovation.gr/projects/mm/) has been built
on top of Freemind [
Overview and Related Work In this section we give a brief overview of tool features and technologies used, and we discuss the related work.
Figure 1 shows the architectute of FreePub. FreePub has been implemented
on top of FreeMind [
The use of mindmaps in information retrieval tasks has been acknowledged
by several researchers. In [
Also, [
Compared to the above works, FreePub provides a full-fledged retrieval service to collect scientific material using mindmaps. It retrieves not only relevant publications, but also supporting material, like blog posts, presentation slides, from several wrapped data sources. Also, it exploits a semantic query expansion ?$52/-<$*&3*"-/,,$
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There are also several open source (e.g., Vue, XMind, Compendium4) and commercial tools (e.g., MindManager, ConceptDraw, iMIndMap5) for mindmapping. However, they are actually mindmapping editors, providing advanced visualization capabilities, document handling and integration facilities with other popular software suites. Neither of them exploits mindmaps as a means for exploration Web search, giving also intelligent query expansion mechanisms, like FreePub does. 3
Mindmapping
Mindmapping [
http://www.thinkbuzan.com This encourages a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks, and idea generation.
Mindmaps is an excellent model for setting up workspaces for internet search, project and task management (including links to necessary files, executables, source of information), knowledge base organization (notes, references), and essay writing and brainstorming. They allow for greater creativity when recording ideas and information, and help the note-takers to associate topics and ideas with visual representations.
A key difference between mindmaps and other graph-based formal modelling representations, e.g. UML, semantic networks, TopicMaps, is that the the latter have explicit structured elements to model relationships. Contrary, mindmaps rerpesent the visual mnemonics of users, exploiting colors, icons and informal visual representations. Visual methods like mindmaps have been used for centuries in learning and problem solving by educators for recording knowledge, visual thinking, and problem solving. Also, mindmaps are based on radial hierarchies showing connections with a centered ruling concept.
Freemind [
Topic, Larger topic: main Waiting topic: a topic that elements, arranged in a needs to be reconsidered topic/subtopic fashion, to represent ideas Needs action: an element for Hot: a critical element which action is needed Detail: text content element Link: direct link element to user (e.g., notes, abstracts, etc) folders, urls, or local files Object (keywords): set of Object (code): piece of code for words used as keywords for an el- an element ement Question: issues that need to be Cloud: set of related elements considered for an element As the user explores a mindmap, she can initiate a search task to retrieve, from several wrapped data sources, documents relevant to mindmap topics. Various search parameters can be determined, like the number of results, the data sources used, etc. For each search task, FreePub starts the retrieval service by first formulating the necessary queries. Keywords are extracted from the content of mindmap elements selected by the user in order to form keyword queries to send to the data sources. A key feature of FreePub is a semantic query expansion mechanism used to extract keywords not only from the selected mindmap elements, but also from their semantic neighbourhood. We discuss this feature in detail later on, in Section 5.
Vertical search. Keyword queries are sent to all wrapped data sources to
retrieve relevant documents. Such data sources usually provide vertical search
facilities, i.e., tailored to certain types of information resources - in our case,
computer science publications (e.g., DBLP, PubMed [
The resulting snippets are extracted from the data sources, cleaned, and
presented to the user. Cleaning includes several facilities used to process the
results in order to remove ambiguities, inconsistencies, etc. Specifically, the
system utilizes a catalog with journal names and conferences extracted from DBLP
and PubMed [
Matching is based on the Levenshtein distance [
Assuming a string s and a catalog of n entries {(a1, t1), (a2, t2), . . . , (an, tn)} with pairs of acronyms ai and titles ti, s is matched to the entry (ai, ti) such that L(s, ai) + L(s, ti) is minimized (0 < i ≤ n). For example, “Very Large Database Conf” and “VLDB Conf”, both are matched to (“Very Large Database Conference”, “VLDB”) catalog entry.
Duplicate elimination. Since results are retrieved from several data sources, duplicate results may appear. Duplicates are removed using entity resolution blocking techniques [23]. The problem of entity resolution involves finding records in a dataset that represent the same real-world entity. Blocking techniques divide data into groups and only compares records within the same group, to avoid redundant comparisons. This is based on the assumption that records in different blocks are unlikely to match.
FreePub implements the following efficient strategy for entity identification and duplicate elimination: 1. The result list of each data source is partitioned into groups, using the publication date as key for each group. For each group we maintain a (key→value) hash structure H, where key is the date and value is the list of publication objects oi. For example: H1 = (2004 → {o1, o3, o5, o6}), H2 = (2005 → {o2, o4}) for data source 1, H3 = (2004 → {o1, o5, o8}) for data source 2, etc. 2. Then, to identify duplicates we check pairs of publication objects (oi, oj ) only for objects than share the same key (date). Checking is done using exact string matching on publication title and publication forum. For instance, in the previous example, only pairs of publication objects from H1 value list and H3 value list will be checked.
Horizontal search. After retrieving docuements relevant to mindmap elements, the user may launch another search task to get supporting material for these documents. Such material includes blog posts discussing the topic of a document, related presentations, other reports etc. To detect the material, FreePub uses horizontal search facilities, i.e., general search engines that cover all the Web, and appropriate options to restrict searches to only certain type of documents. Specifically, FreePub searches for the following support material for each retrieved publication: 1. pub document: a query string is constructed from publication’s title, and the filetype:pdf or doc option is used in order to retrieve results. Further heuristic rules are used in order to certify that the retrieved result is indeed the document of the publication. E.g., we parse the retrieved documents and check whether the title of the publication appears in, etc. 2. pub abstract: the abstract is extracted either by parsing the document identified in 1. or by looking for the appropriate metadata fields in the data source used, since several data sources provide such information. 3. slide presentation: a query string is constructed from publication’s title, and the filetype:ppt or pdf option is used in order to retrieve results. Further heuristic rules are used in order to certify that the retrieved results are indeed presentations. E.g., we parse the retrieved documents and check whether certain terms appear inside, e.g., the term“outline”, terms from the sections of the document identified in 1., etc. 4. blog entries: a query string is constructed from publication’s title along with author’s name and issued to the Google Blogs Search Engine to retrieve results.
Wrappers. FreePub retrieves scientific documents from several data sources,
e.g., the collection of Computer Science Bibliography [
To demonstrate how WebHarvest work, we show the part of the html source of the first three results returned from google blog search for the term “ubuntu”.
WebHarvest is based on an XML configuration file describing the process to extract data. The elements define access to html pages, files, databases, mails, ftp servers and configures the work flow. An example of an XML configuration file that parses the above html source follows:
In line 3, the variable searchQuery is assigned the value “ubuntu”, which is actually the search term. In line 6, the value of searchQuery is appended to the Google blogs search address and passed to the WebHarvests HTTP engine which returns the results page in raw HTML. In line 5, WebHarvests HTML-to-XML engine is called, which transforms the raw HTML code into a well formed XML document, which is assigned to the newly defined variable content in line 4. An abstract of the XML document that contains the information for one result is shown below: ... <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/10/latest-ubuntu-1010-emphasizes.php" id="p-1">Latest <b>Ubuntu</b>10.10 Emphasizes the Cloud - ReadWriteCloud</a> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
As we can see in the above excerpt, all the information we need for title and address is included in the first <a ... /a> line. To parse the information, in line 10, the WebHarvests XPath engine is called with the XPath expression //a[contains(@id,“p-”)] as argument which returns the title of the result. Similarly, in lines 14-18, we acquire the abstract of the result.
The advantage of using scraping tools to wrap Web data sources is that they simplify the interfacing with the data sources, since no hardcoded text processing code in needed. While technologies like Web services have become popular nowadays, scraping tools will always be necessary to get information form data sources that isnt yet offered through some SOAP-like interface. Presentation and visualization. FreePub provides several facet-based visualization and presentation options to manipulate the resulting list of documents and their support material. The results may be organized by date, forum, author, or using any regular expressions that involves any of the above fields. Note that any time during a creativity cycle, the user may import any of the result (i.e., document, support material, etc) into the mindmap. 5
Semantic query expansion In FreePub, query formulation is performed by extracting keywords from mindmap elements. The whole task is coordinated by a semantic query expansion mechanism. The key point is that keywords are not extracted only from user-selected mindmap elements, but also from their semantic neighbourhood.
Initially, the semantic neighbourhood is decided automatically by the system, and includes important elements which are connected with the selected elements in the mindmap. The user may refine the neighbourhood by marking/unmarking mindmap elements.
FreePub employs a term ranking scheme to determine the top-K important
terms (i.e., keywords) in the semantic neighbourhood of user-selected mindmap
elements. These terms are used to expand the initial keyword query. Term
importance is decided based on a tf/idf-oriented weighting scheme [
t 6. Terms are sorted according to Wt, and the terms with the better K scores are used to expand the initial query. K is user-defined. 6
FreePub in use Since there are no mindmap benchmarks, we demonstrate FreePub advantages by presenting in this section a test case of working with FreePub (arranged with the research team of DIANA lab6 at BSRC Fleming) to collect and organize scientific material regarding the microRNA target prediction problem.
Next, we give some background info for microRNAs to better understand
the mindmap in Figure 2. microRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNA molecules that
regulate gene expression by binding directly and preferably to the 3’
untranslated region (3’UTR) of the sequence of genes [
Figure 2 illustrates part of a mindmap for the miRNA target prediction problem set up by the researchers. Take for example the mindmap element microRNA target prediction, and its two subtopic elements DIANA-microT and TargetScan. Both predict genes that are targeted by miRNAs. The former was introduce in 2004, and since then it has received significant improvements. Currently has been shown (using pSilac) to be the most precise program currently available. The latter provides several important features that affect miRNA targeting.
Generally, most target prediction programs use several features to identify putative miRNA binding sites, such as evolutionary conservation, structural accessibility, nucleotide composition and others. Thus, a researcher considers that training learning functions using Naive Bayes models might be one way to follow for miRNA target prediction. She records this as a mindmap element, and starts the search. Figure 4 shows the resulting list of papers. Note that FreePub has expanded the initial user query from “Naive Bayes” to “methods naive bayes target microrna prediction”, due to its semantic query expansion service.
The researcher selects, then, a couple of papers and a related presentation as supporting material to move to the mindmap. Figure 5 shows the retrieved supporting material, and Figure 6 shows the resulting mindmap.
Current status and future work In this work, we presented FreePub, a creativity support tool to collect and organize scientific material using mindmaps. FreePub supports creativity cycles. A user starts such a cycle by setting up her domain of interest using mindmaps. Then, she can browse mindmaps and launch search tasks to gather relevant publications from several data sources. FreePub, besides publications, identifies helpful supporting material (e.g., blog posts, presentations). All retrieved information from FreePub can be organized in mindmaps. FreePub has been fully implemented on top of FreeMind, a popular open-source, mindmapping tool.
For future work, we first plan to set up a detailed user-based evaluation of our tool with the help of a large number of scientists, and record their feedback after performing creativity cycles using FreePub. We also plan to develop several new services: (a) tagging facilities, (b) retrieval facilities for support material like, e.g., survey papers, highly-impact papers, etc., and (c) visual, easy-to-use scrapping facilities based on user query-by-example input in order to wrap data sources. Moreover, we will work on improving the semantic query expansion method. Finally, we will exploit public services like Mendeley and CiteULike7 to evaluate the impact of retrieved publications, and the relations between them. 7 http://www.mendeley.com/, http://www.citeulike.org/ 15. Liu J, Carmell MA, Rivas FV, Marsden CG, Thomson JM, Song JJ, Hammond SM, Joshua-Tor L, and Hannon GJ. Argonaute2 is the catalytic engine of mammalian rnai. Science, 305(5689):1437–1441, 2004. 16. Lucene. http://lucene.apache.org. 17. Kiriakidou M, Nelson PT, Kouranov A, Fitziev P, Bouyioukos C, Mourelatos Z, and Hatzigeorgiou A. A combined computational-experimental approach predicts human microrna targets. Genes Dev, 18(10):1165–1178, 2004. 18. Lagos-Quintana M, Rauhut R, Lendeckel W, and Tuschl T. Identification of novel genes coding for small expressed rnas. Science, 294(5543):853–858, 2001. 19. PubMed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/. 20. Lee RC, Feinbaum RL, and Ambros V. The c. elegans heterochronic gene lin-4 encodes small rnas with antisense complementarity to lin-14. Cell, 75(5):843–854, 1993. 21. Ben Shneiderman. Creativity support tools: accelerating discovery and innovation.
Communications of the ACM, 50(12):20–32, 2007. 22. WebHarvest. http://web-harvest.sourceforge.net/. 23. Steven Euijong Whang, David Menestrina, Georgia Koutrika, Martin Theobald, and Hector Garcia-Molina. Entity resolution with iterative blocking. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conference, 2009.