Looking for collaborators on an open discovery project using D3.js

[Peter Kraker]

I hope that this isn't off-topic. I am the maintainer of a D3.js based overview visualization of academic literature called Head Start (http://github.com/pkraker/Headstart). I am currently writing a proposal for the Open Science Prize (http://openscienceprize.org) to enhance the system and I am still seeking collaborators. Please see the call below for details:

"Discovery is an essential task for every researcher, especially in dynamic research fields such as biomedicine. Currently, however, there are only a limited number of tools that can be used by a mainstream audience.We propose BLAZE, an open discovery tool that goes far beyond the functionality of search engines and social reading lists. The tool builds on Pubmed Central and other open content sources and will provide topical maps for a given list of papers, e.g. a search result or a journal volume. The maps are created automatically using fulltexts to calculate similarities and derive topical structures among papers. Furthermore, they will be enriched with features that are extracted from the papers (e.g. all papers with the same species are highlighted). BLAZE will enable users to do their discovery in a single interface. Users can interact with the maps, explore different topical areas, filter and read individual papers in the same interface. An edit mode will provided for users to make changes to the maps and to introduce new papers and topical areas. Users can openly share maps with others and
export the structure in various open formats. BLAZE will be based on the existing open source visualization Head Start (http://github.com/pkraker/Headstart), and make extensive use of the digital open science ecosystem, including, but not limited to, open content, content mining services, open source solutions, and open metrics data. With this tool, we want to show the potential of open science for innovation in scholarly communication and discovery. In addition, we believe that this tool will increase the visibility of and awareness for open content and open science in general."

A first draft is also available:
https://github.com/pkraker/open-discovery/blob/master/proposal.md

I am looking for backend and frontend web developers who code in JavaScript and/or PHP and R. We will be extending an existing tool for creating web-based knowledge domain visualizations that uses D3.js (http://d3js.org) on the frontend, and R content mining packages on the backend, in particular rOpenSci (https://ropensci.org/) and tm (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tm/index.html), so you should have experience with at least one of these libraries. A background in biomed would be nice but it’s not mandatory.

Everything about this project will be open: we will prepare the proposal in the open, the development will take place on a public Github repository, and all project outputs will be published under an open license.

So if you want to join the project and create an awesome open science tool together with me, please send an e-mail to opendi...@gmx.at, outlining which part of the project interests you most, what you’d be able to contribute and how many hours you could devote to the project over the coming months. Please also include a link to your Github repository. I am looking forward to your messages!

Best,
Peter

--
Vienna, Austria
http://science20.wordpress.com

Twitter: @PeterKraker
Github: @pkraker