Modeling a Concept-based Information System to Promote Scientific Discovery: The Telemakus System

With the rapid growth of scientific publications, the ability of researchers to effectively find or integrate new domain knowledge is proving increasingly difficult. The idea of developing an information system to promote scientific discovery is being explored on a number of fronts [1-3]. A concept-based information system represents a document in terms of the underlying thoughts, not simply in terms of word occurrence. Such a model presents a high level view of a document as an integrated conceptual schema and, furthermore, shows how groups of documents are inter-related on a conceptual level. The user of a concept-based information system is presented with both a macro-view of domain knowledge-which can facilitate identification of patterns and expected and unexpected occurrences of relationships between research concepts-as well as a micro view of consistently presented detailed document attributes such as research methods and findings. The research report schema, in fact, mimics the structure of the research report itself.