A new system to support knowledge discovery: Telemakus

An unfortunate consequence of specialization in the sciences is poor communication across domains - which can hamper the knowledge discovery process. Research findings in one area may be pertinent to another, researchers may be unaware of relevant work by others that could be integrated into theirs, and important findings just outside a researcher's focus may go undiscovered. Compounding this problem is the information overload issue - the difficulty of keeping current with information that continues to grow at an exponential rate. The development of methods and tools for assisting researchers and other professionals in an effective extraction of problem-oriented knowledge from heterogeneous and massive information sources, and for using this knowledge in problem-solving is one of the most fundamental research directions for the information and computer sciences today. It is clear that there is a need for new tools to support more precise identification of relevant research articles and, further, to provide visual clues regarding relationships among the document sets. We present here a suite of such tools which has been in development at the University of Washington for several years.