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.
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).
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.
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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.
Second biennial conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019), Leipzig, Germany, May 2019.
2018
2017
paper Data integration and disintegration: Managing Springer Nature SciGraph with SHACL and OWL
Industry Track, International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-17), Vienna, Austria, Oct 2017.
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.
2014
paper Factoid-based Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: towards an integrated approach
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Dec 2014. doi: 10.1093/llc/fqt037
2012
Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg, Germany, Jul 2012.
2011
Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities, Lawrence, Kansas, Sep 2011.
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.