Browsing and Visualizing Digital Bibliographic Data

Abstract

Access to publications is provided by conventional libraries, digital libraries operated by learned societies or commercial publishers, and a huge number of web sites maintained by the scientists themselves or their institutions. But comprehensive meta-indices in combination with a helpful graphical user interface for this increasing number of information sources are missing for most areas of science. Our DBLP (Digital Bibliography & Library Project) Computer Science Bibliography is a major service used by thousands of computer scientists. It provides fundamental support for scientists searching for publications or other scientists in similar communities. For better assistance we developed a new browser prototype which has a user-friendly interface and plays a central role in the search and browsing of the data. The DBL-Browser provides smart search functions and several textual and graphical visualization models. This paper gives an overview of some important research issues within the field of bibliographical information retrieval and visualization. After introducing the whole framework, the DBL-Browser itself and various visualization models are described.