Nature.com Subjects Stream Graph


The nature.com subjects stream graph displays the distribution of content across the subject areas covered by the nature.com portal.

This is an experimental interactive visualisation based on a freely available dataset from the nature.com linked data platform, which I've been working on in the last few months. streamgraph

The main visualization provides an overview of selected content within the level 2 disciplines of the NPG Subjects Ontology. By clicking on these, it is then possible to explore more specific subdisciplines and their related articles.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Subjects Ontology: this is a categorization of scholarly subject areas which are used for the indexing of content on nature.com. It includes subject terms of varying levels of specificity such as Biological sciences (top level), Cancer (level 2), or B-2 cells (level 7). In total there are more than 2500 subject terms, organized into a polyhierarchical tree. Starting in 2010, the various journals published on nature.com have adopted the subject ontology to tag their articles (note: different journals have started doing this at different times, hence some variations in the graph starting dates).

streamgraph2

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The visualization makes use of various d3.js modules, plus some simple customizations here and there. The hardest part of the work was putting the different page components together, to the effect of a more fluent 'narrative' achieved by gradually zooming into the data.

The back end is a Django web application with a relational database. The original dataset is published as RDF, so in order to use the Django APIs I've recreated it as a relational model. That let me also add a few extra data fields containing search indexes (e.g. article counts per month), so to make the stream graph load faster.

Comments or suggestions, as always very welcome.

Cite this blog post:


Michele Pasin. Nature.com Subjects Stream Graph. Blog post on www.michelepasin.org. Published on Jan. 3, 2016.

Comments via Github:


See also:

2023


2019


paper  Modeling publications in SN SciGraph 2012-2019

Workshop on Scholarly Digital Editions, Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies, Université de Lausanne, Jun 2019.



paper  Interlinking SciGraph and DBpedia datasets using Link Discovery and Named Entity Recognition Techniques

Second biennial conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019), Leipzig, Germany, May 2019.




2015


paper  Learning how to become a linked data publisher: the nature.com ontologies portal.

5th Workshop on Linked Science 2015, colocated with ISWC 2015., Bethlehem, USA, Sep 2015.





2010



paper  Data integration perspectives from the London Theatres Bibliography project

Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI 2010), Montreal, Canada, Jun 2010.


2009




paper  Meaning and Structure in the London Theatres Bibliography

The Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Mar 2009.