On creating an knowledge visualization software

This is the manifesto I wrote when created a software that visualized scientific knowledge.

ACT1: SCENE SETTING

Collective knowledge in written format is being digitized at an incredible pace.

In today’s world, we check the news directly from newspaper’s websites, we read e-books on tablet computers, and download scholarly articles from public repositories or directly from journals’ webpages. We write and post our thoughts and opinions in blogs. We access content from books published many years ago because libraries have scanned their collections and provided digital copies for their books. We can query an entire collection of patents for our technology of interest directly from an online search.

It is undeniable that the digital age we live in has dramatically improved the way we access information. At the same time, it has also empowered people to use information in ways that positively impact society.

It is also true, however, that the pace at which new information is being created, digitized and stored is greatly surpassing our capacity to process it in meaningful ways, ways that would allow us to extract the most relevant content that matches our specific interests on any particular topic. Thus, we need to embark on developing new technologies capable of processing, in a holistic manner, the information contained on collective knowledge being produced by our societies. Furthermore, any new technology developed for this purpose has to contemplate and empower the need of individuals in understanding their own data-sets, assembled from any collection of papers, books, blogs, news articles or whatever documents they find relevant to their purposes.

Take as an example the current interest on topics such as climate change, income inequality, innovation, and diabetes, to name a few. A simple keyword search on the websites of several newspapers and/or repositories of scientific articles will return thousands of article entries, making it extremely challenging for a single individual to process this amount of information holistically, on a stand-alone effort.

ACT2: RISING ACTION

As an entrepreneur and plant scientist, I personally experienced the difficulty of handling vast amount of information when, confronted with the assembly of my own collection of scientific articles on salt stress in plants, it turned out to contain 2,000 pdf files from more than ten different journals. For me to read, absorb and integrate into my daily work the knowledge contained in this library would take about 2.7 years, assuming I read two articles each day. I quickly realized the need for computer software capable of analyzing the knowledge contained in my library in a manner that would help me identify a particular trend within the field of interest as well as focus my reading on the most relevant articles. I decided to take a chance and work towards the development of such software. The idea behind this quest was that if it works to solve a particular need I had, it would also work to solve the needs of many others struggling to crunch their digital collection of papers.

ACT 3:THE TURNING POINT

This is how QiWord℠ (pronounced kee-wurd) was born and is the reason for its existence. It is the result of a true team effort working countless hours. While it was conceived from an idea that struck my head like thunder one day, its implementation originated right from the interaction of five people. Two software developers, a graphic designer, an investor and I poured together our passions to implement a novel idea because we all believe that this could improve people’s daily work at school, laboratory or office.

From the first-ever version of QiWord℠, developed as proof-of-concept in conjunction with Jeff Mandell, to the amazing version presented on this website and developed in conjunction with Neil Desh, to the designs created by Maral Arslanian, and with the required funds provided by George M. Sabovick, our objective remained the same: to provide you with a tool capable of analyzing the collective knowledge contained in your library of PDF files as a whole.

With this objective in mind, I came up with the name of QiWord℠, pronounced the same as keyword and conveying two terms fused together: “Qi” + “Word.” According to Wikipedia, the definition of “Qi” in traditional Chinese culture is “an active principle forming part of any living thing” and can be frequently translated as “natural energy,” life force,” or “energy flow.” The name represents the life force of the software, which is to search for the co-occurrence of two keywords of interest in the same sentence, and calculate their relative frequency of co-occurrence in a period of time over all sentences contained in your library.

This powerful feature re-defines the way you search across your collection of papers because you can immediately access at once all the specific sentences containing any of your two keywords of interest, as well as the papers containing them. Furthermore, the search takes place all across the document, and thus is not restricted to the title or abstract section alone.

With QiWord℠, you now have a tool that helps you think in a holistic manner while taking advantage of the knowledge contained in your library. You can find previously unexpected connections when identifying novel terms associated with your keywords of interest. Even more fundamentally, you can re-define the question: What is [X]? by taking in the entire realm of collective knowledge contained in your library.

ACT 4: THE FALLING ACTION

Let’s apply this concept to the definition of innovation, and then ask:

What is innovation?

Here are three definitions (from the many out there):

“Innovation is a new idea, device or process.” Taken from Wikipedia (accessed on December 22, 2014).

“Innovation is significant positive change.” From Scott Berkun, author of the book The Myth of Innovation (published on January 1, 2007).

“Innovation is something different that has impact.” From Scott Anthony on his article “31 innovation questions (and answers) to kick off the new year,” published on the journal Harvard Business Review(December 27, 2010).

From these three definitions you can extract several dimensions that makes up the concept of innovation: (1) novel idea, (2) novel device (product), (3) novel process, (4) change, (5) difference, and (6) impact. Taking this together, it would mean that if you want your company, team, organization or institution to be more innovative then you probably should come up with:

An idea/process/product that is novel, is different, that changes the status quo and has impact.

You can now ask: Is this definition really adequate for me, or my organization, to experience what innovation truly is?

You can use QiWord℠ to help you answer this question, not by taking three definitions alone, but by taking the collective knowledge written on innovation as a whole! Here is how:

CREATE a virtual library containing hundreds of articles written on innovation. UPLOAD your library to QiWord℠. GRAPH all the words associated with innovation through their co-occurrence on the same sentence. DISCOVER the most frequent words that are written with innovation in the same sentence for your entire library. DISCOVER how many dimensions make up the word/concept of innovation based on collective knowledge.

Luckily, we did it for you already! As a test case, we CREATED a virtual library containing 318 articles written on innovation. These articles were collected by performing an online search using the keyword “innovation” from the website of (a) a newspaper (The New York Times), (b) a scientific journal (Nature Biotechnology), and (c) a business magazine (The Harvard Business Review). We UPLOADED our “innovation library” into QiWord℠, and obtained a node GRAPH depicting the top 100 most frequent words co-occurring with innovation in the same sentence, over all sentences contained in the library. We queried the keywords: innovation, innovations, and innovative.

Here is what we DISCOVERED:

Located at the center of the node graph were the words innovation, innovations, and innovative, and at the periphery were all the words most frequently associated with innovation/innovations/innovative in the same sentence. As we could immediately see, there were 16 dimensions associated with innovation: in fact, many more than the six dimensions previously identified when we took into account the three definitions previously described.

This means that the analysis of collective knowledge on innovation using QiWord℠ suggests that in order for your organization to be more innovative or to go through the innovation path, it has to EXPERIENCE the following dimensions:

(1) ideation (words: idea/ideas, think, create and design) (2) knowledge generation (words: research and science) (3) application of knowledge (words: development and manufacturing) (4) focus (word: focus) (5) use of technology (word: technology(ies)) (6) change, novelty (words: change, new and first) (7) people (words: people and team) (8) process (word: process) (9) product (word: product(s)) (10) market need (words: market, need and customers) (11) value (words: value, growth, global) (12) funding (words: capital, support and funding) (13) time (words: time and year(s)) (14) intellectual property (word: patent(s)) (15) private business/company (words: firms, corporate, companies and business) (16) policy (word: government)

Here, we have presented you with an entire new way for looking at the question of What is innovation?

Indeed, rather than relying on definitions about what innovation is, you can instead strive to address what innovation is composed of, so that you can experience it. Which approach is most useful to you?

ACT 5: THE DENOUEMENT OR RELEASE

As a society, we still need to keep finding new answers to important questions. Interestingly, for many of those questions we already have the answers, but they are buried deep within piles and piles of written knowledge in forms of documents, papers, articles, news, blogs and books. We need to embark in developing novel technologies that allow us to address in a holistic and intuitive manner, the existing collective knowledge produced as a society. QiWord℠ is our humble attempt in this direction, and empowers your own efforts in understanding collective knowledge produced on your topic of interests.

I hope you join me on this quest.

Sincerely,

Martin Calvino, PhD

“The idea stayed with me that computers could become much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information.”

Quote from Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web.

Extracted from The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2014).