BibRelEx: exploring bibliographic databases by visualization of annotated content-based relations

Traditional searching and browsing functions for bibliographic databases do no longer enable users to deal efficiently with the rapidly growing number of scientific publications. We propose to visualize contents-based relations among documents such as cites, succeeds, improves with respect to, and to use them for more effective exploration. In addition, we encourage users to attach annotations that may be either private or public to documents or to pairs of related documents. The aggregation of public annotations contributed by expert users represents insight into the area that exceeds the knowledge that is represented in the documents themselves. In this paper we report on the status of our project BibRelEx, and invite discussion about its future goals.