Designing an Interactive 2-Level Circular Algorithm to Visualize and Support Collaboration in Science

Researchers are always trying to get the most important knowledge, however, finding accurate results in the current science deluge have never been more critical than now. While information technologies have changed the way we collect, store and retrieve information, there is a lack of strategies that support the exploration and presentation of scholar knowledge. Circular layouts are well-known structures for visualizing relations between entities, and as opposed to force direct layouts, are a more effective and user-friendly solution for visualizing relationships. This article presents a novel 2-level circular structure to map and support cooperation in science communities. The 2-level circular layout was designed and implemented using D3.js and is able to depict the relations between two different entities: the community that falls within a specific knowledge area (outer circle), and the articles curated by the community (inner circle). The goal is to support a collaboration scenario between researchers, who in turn share important knowledge based on their reading experience. The 2-level circular structure provide an overview plus details of the relations between these two entities. The preliminary results provide interesting results and pave the way for future research on a two-level layout. The link to access the visualization and code can be found at the end of the article.