Analysing and Visualizing Polish Scientific Community1

This paper describes the rationale and partial results of an ongoing experiment aiming to perform analysis and visualization of social and organizational structure of Polish scientific community. Work described in this paper concerns automated extraction of information (related to DSc theses) from Internet based sources and visualization of resulting data set. Primary database that was mined was a scientific information repository “Polish Science (“Nauka Polska” in Polish) maintained by the Information Processing Centre (OPI – “Ośrodek Przetwarzania Informacji” in Polish). The nature of this repository, specifically lack of any data export facility and web scrapping prevention provisions implemented (despite the fact, that database is supported by public funds), complicated data extraction process. However, when finally downloaded, verified and processed the data set proved to be very interesting and valuable, making possible statistical analysis and geospatial visualization. Specifically, this paper describes creation of a software tool able to create geographical maps depicting collaboration between various research institutions in Poland during the process of DSc theses review. It should be regarded as a report on a work in progress. It is a part of larger SYNAT project, being a government funded initiative to create an ICT infrastructure supporting scientific collaboration and exchange of research data in Poland. The results presented herein constitute just a proof of concept for a visualization approach that will be implemented when more detailed data, concerning Polish scientific community, will be collected during other SYNAT activities.