As part of the call for proposals for grants for small technical projects, IDS KS funded developers, Arun Ramanujapuram and Vani S Hemmige, based in India, to develop Locwise – a spatial and semantic refiner of search results.
Built using content from the IDS KS API, LocWise enables users to quickly find locale-specific research by browsing “concepts” on a map, rather than just laboriously scrolling through lists of search results. Users can specify a broad query to express their interests. LocWise then returns a “list of concepts” extracted from the content of the search results as well as displaying a map with pins that indicate the number of documents referring to a given location. Clicking on any given pin will displays a list of documents that refer-to or mention that location. Users can further refine the search results by selecting “concepts” from the concept list. This combination of “concept refinement” and “map visualization” offers users a unique way to refine search results and quickly drill-down to locale-specific information of interest.
We thought this was a really interesting project as it provided a new way of looking at search results but also was a successful proof of concept that this type of automatic content extraction and geolocation can provide new contexts and useful data.
Arun states
“We sincerely hope this application can gain widespread use and realize its impact – help all development practitioners quickly find the content they want across a wide-variety of high-quality repositories. In future, we hope that additional content repositories can be associated with LocWise to increase the reach of content and make this a critical tool for any development practitioner.”
Visit http://locwise4.appspot.com/ today to find our what research is returned for your area of specialisation or your geographic location.