Dynamic Visualizer of Research Footprints Wins Elsevier's Application Development Challenge in China

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Mar 08, 2012, 08:40 ET

AMSTERDAM, March 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Grand Prize goes to "Aerial Viewer", built by graduate students from Institute of Computing Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences and Fudan University

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, today announced the winners and winning applications of its first China Science Challenge, a competition calling out software developers to create customized solutions to enhance the search and discovery experience for researchers on the SciVerse platform.

Participants of the challenge worked in teams to submit concepts for applications and were then invited to move forward with their proposed project over the course of a six-week development period. In addition to the content provided via SciVerse Application Programming Interface (API), teams used a variety of data sources of their choice including Microsoft Academic Search API, Google Map and Google Trends API.

The winning teams and their applications are:

Grand Prize: Yingzhong Xu, Institute of Computing Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Jingjing Han, Fudan University. The team developed "Aerial Viewer", an application that allows users to quickly understand a compilation of related industry research papers, authors and organizations. The app generates a detailed, multi-dimension framework of information - statistical data, journals, conferences, published papers, and visual maps of frequently used keywords - to help researchers, librarians and research technology programmers understand an entire research footprint.
Second Prize: Xiaobing Liu, Yang Lu and Jinpeng Wang of Peking University. The team developed "ezReading", an app that finds name entities in articles and links them to Wikipedia to help users understand articles and research topics more easily.
Special Mention: Jianfei Wang and Bo Gao of Tsinghua University. The team developed "Arnet Map" to map out top researchers from a variety of research disciplines based on their geographical locations.

"The Aerial Viewer app is inspired by the daily challenges we are confronted with as graduate students when searching and filtering relevant research papers," said Mr. Yingzhong Xu, "Researchers, especially students, can be overwhelmed by the immense volume of search results which makes it difficult to confirm a paper's importance, particularly if the researcher is unfamiliar with major journals and conferences. We thought SciVerse is a good platform to solve this problem, so we built and integrated our application with SciVerse ScienceDirect and SciVerse Hub."

"The creativity displayed by the winning research solutions is remarkable," said Rafael Sidi, Vice President Product Management, Applications Marketplace and Developer Network at Elsevier. "We appreciate the advice and support from Professor Jie Tang at Tsinghua University Department of Computer Science and are pleased to have engaged developers in the academic community in China for the first time."

The winning applications - Aerial Viewer, ezReading and Arnet Map - were selected by the Applications Marketplace and Developer Network at Elsevier and will be featured and available to download in the SciVerse Applications Marketplace in the coming months.

About the Elsevier SciVerse Suite

The SciVerse® suite of search and discovery offerings provides the global research community access to a constantly expanding universe of content and solutions which can now be accessed in one platform. The suite currently includes SciVerse ScienceDirect®, the world's largest source of peer-reviewed content containing more than 10 million articles, and SciVerse Scopus®, an abstract and citation database containing 41 million records, 70% with abstracts and nearly 19,500 titles from 5,000 publishers worldwide. The platform also includes SciVerse Hub which enables researchers to perform a single search across all of the SciVerse content as well as targeted web content with results ranked by relevancy and without duplication. Applications and Developer Network allow the scientific community to build, find and use applications that enhance the SciVerse research experience.

About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).