BibRelEx: exploring bibliographic databases by visualization of annotated content-based relations

Traditional searching and browsing functions for bibliographic databases no longer enable researchers to deal efficiently with the rapidly growing number of scientific publications. Our project BibRelEx aggregates expert knowledge on a body of scientific literature and makes it available to researchers who wish to explore the literature. We take a two-pronged approach. First, we collect expert annotations on publications and their semantic relationships to other publications. Second, we let researchers explore this semantically enriched body of literature and knowledge through visualizations. Hence, we enable researchers to track relevant documents based on their colleagues' expertise. We are testing our approach with a bibliographic database in a computational geometry.