The New Version of Government Research Bulletin (GRB) Website Applying Visualization and Text-mining Tools

Government Research Bulletin (GRB) (www.grb.gov.tw) is the official platform to provide up-to-date information regarding the government funded research projects in Taiwan. Since GRB was launched in 1997, it has been operated as a data warehouse to collect and store research information from research institutes. To increase the discoverability and accessibility of the research information in GRB, the website services of GRB have been improved recently by applying visualization tools and text-mining tools. The new GRB provides multi-dimensional search engine for users to search for research projects, researchers and institutes. Users can explore the search results through not only the related record list, but also the word cloud graphs derived from text-mining results of those related contents. Word cloud graphs can help users to form concepts in mind about what researches have been done recently. The new GRB also applies an API provided by Lucene to calculate the similarity between every two projects, and to provide the list of similar projects ranking by their similarity to the main project interested by users. Users can also easily find a group of researchers working on similar topics and their cooperation network graphs by typing in a researcher’s name or just a keyword in the researcher search engine. Furthermore, to help users locate the institutes which are conducting projects on a specific topic, geographic visualization tool is applied to display the location of those institutions. Besides the improvement of search engine, a data-oriented charting tool called Highcharts is also applied to display the real-time calculated results of the data collected by GRB. Users can interact with the charts online to explore the number of projects and the amount of research budgets that government has already input every year since 1993. To further serve users interested in some specific hot topics (such as biotech medicine, green energy, and artificial intelligent), the new GRB also provides analysis reports and value-added analyses using GRB data to reveal the research trends about those hot topics. Now GRB are still evolving for providing better research information services.