- Open Knowledge Maps
- A visual interface to the world's scientific knowledge
is to revolutionize discovery of scientific knowledge. We are building a visual interface that dramatically increases the visibility of research findings for science and society alike. We are a charitable non-profit organization and we believe that a better way to explore and discover scientific knowledge will benefit us all.
Get an overview of a research topic: knowledge maps provide an instant overview of a topic by showing the main areas at a glance, and documents related to each area. This makes it possible to easily identify useful, pertinent information.
Separate the wheat from the chaff: we cluster similar documents together. This makes it easier to identify relevant content when you are searching for an ambiguous term, or when you would like to identify content from a single discipline in a multidisciplinary field.
Identify relevant concepts: one of the most difficult tasks when you are new in a research field is to learn the “language” of the field. Open Knowledge Maps makes it easier for you by labeling research areas with relevant concepts.
Find open content: our knowledge maps include both closed and open access documents. However we highlight open access documents - and the majority of those documents can be read from within the interface. And if not, the fulltext is only a click away.
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A Knowledge Map presents you with a topical overview for your search query based on the 100 most relevant documents matching your query.
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We use text similarity to create the knowledge maps. The algorithm groups those documents together that have many words in common.
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The visualization is intended to give you a head start on your scholarly search. You can identify relevant areas at a glance and documents related to them.
... we want to turn discovery into an open and collaborative process. By sharing the results of our discoveries, we can save valuable time and build on top of each other's knowledge. Watch the video below to find out what this could look like:
In order to realize our vision we propose to fund Open Knowledge Maps in a collective effort. We invite organizations to become supporting members.
We joined Open Knowledge Maps as a Supporting Member because it is an innovative tool for literature search and we are eager to support the further development of Open Knowledge Maps.
Dr. David Johann, Head of Group Knowledge Management, ETH Library, ETH Zurich
I love how OKMaps breaks down the papers into clusters allowing me to identify themes in the literature and focus on papers that are most pertinent for my work.
Girija Goyal, ReFigure Co-Founder, Staff Scientist at Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, USA
Open Knowledge Maps is a considerable reinforcement in the areas of open science & open access, which are central to our research services.
Dr. Andrea Hacker, Open Access and Bern Open Publishing (BOP), University Library Bern
Now that science gets more and more open, we need ways to visualize it in a relevant way. That's why I support OKMaps.
Jean-Claude Burgelman, Professor of Open Science at VUB, Editor in Chief at Frontiers Policy Labs
Open Knowledge Maps is one of these initiatives we consider to be a visionary innovator in the field of discovery in open spaces.
Prof. Dr. Klaus Tochtermann, Director, ZBW
Education and Knowledge empower people, and everybody should have access to them, it is great to have tools like Open Knowledge Maps empowering people around the world.
Mari Plaza, Data Scientist
Everyone should be able to benefit from scientific knowledge. Therefore we need open source non-profit discovery systems for an open science. Find out more in our white paper and let us know what you think!
We propose to fund Open Knowledge Maps in a collective effort. Organizations are invited to become supporting members and co-create the platform with us.
Would you like to introduce Open Knowledge Maps to your community? We put together a workshop kit that makes it easy to introduce the tool to your peers.
Check out or open source visualization framework Headstart on Github.
Read our article in 027.7 Journal for Library Culture to find out more about how Open Knowledge Maps works.
Do you still have questions? Have a look at our Frequently Asked Questions section.