Researcher Profile: A Web 2.
0 application
for visualising research communities
[Tool Demonstration]
Aurelien Malisart
Service de Génie Logiciel, Institut d’Informatique
Université de Mons, Place du Parc 20, 7000 Mons
aurelien.malisart@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
We introduce a Web 2.0 application for sharing research informa-
tion within a community of collaborating researchers. The applica-
tion extends the social networking application Facebook with sup-
port for visualising how researchers belonging to the same group
collaborate (in terms of joint publications, events, projects and so
on). We propose to use this application for the ERCIM Working
Group on Software Evolution and, by extension, the entire software
evolution research community.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques—
User interfaces; H.3.4 [Information Systems]: Systems and Soft-
ware—User profiles and alert services; H.3.5 [Information Sys-
tems]: Online Information Services—Web-based services; H.5.3
[Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organi-
zation Interfaces—Web-based interaction
General Terms
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors, Management
Keywords
Web 2.0, research community, collaboration, social network, visu-
alisation, Facebook
1. INTRODUCTION
At last year’s EVOL workshop, Cook et al. [2] proposed ELSE,
a European research Laboratory in Software Evolution. Their goal
was to provide “a virtual research environment (VRE) where re-
searchers in software evolution and related fields can find anno-
tated collections of data, tools, patterns and templates, ‘how-to’
documents, previous results, and access to expertise in using them.
The Laboratory will provide an on-line environment where researchers
and practitioners can share research facilities and experiences and
seek partners in projects”.
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145
We have developed a tool that brings us one step closer to this
goal. It exploits Web 2.0 technology as a means to allow a group of
researchers (in the first place, the software evolution community)
to share their research results and contributions. More in particu-
lar, we have developed a Facebook application to share information
about publications, events and research projects that are of interest
to a given community. The application can be used to visualise col-
laborations between researchers, and to explore how the research
field evolves. The main goal of this paper is to raise awareness of
this Facebook application, and to encourage its use. We welcome
any feedback so that we can try to enhance the application in the
future with new desired functionalities.
2. WHY FACEBOOK?
We have chosen to integrate our application into an existing so-
cial network rather than developing a brand new social system from
scratch. This is motivated by the fact we can in that case reuse the
existing social connexions between persons in a network already
used for other goals. Basic functionalities such as forums and com-
ments can be reused too. It also avoids users to remember yet an-
other login and password.
The tool presented in this article is called Researcher Profile1 . It
has been developed in the context of my masters thesis in computer
science, directed by Pr. Tom Mens of the University of Mons2 ,
and was defended in June 2009 [1]. In order to achieve the objec-
tives raised in Section 1, different candidate social networks were
studied and compared (including LinkedIn, Plaxo, NetLog, Xing).
Facebook3 was selected as the most appropriate candidate because
its API was more stable and contained more functionalities than
the other candidates. In addition, there were significantly more de-
velopment tools available for Facebook. Other useful features of
Facebook are its popularity (over 200 million active users counted
in June 2009) and the built-in ability to manage groups and events.
3. ABOUT THE APPLICATION
The goal of Researcher Profile is to allow researchers within
the same domain (i.e., belonging to the same Facebook group) to
share and compare their research profile consisting of publications,
events organised or attended, research projects involved in, and so
on. Figures 1, 2 and 3 illustrate this for publications, events and
research projects, respectively. It allows users of our application to
visualise and explore the collaborations graphically, which can be
very useful for the newcomers in a research field.
1
apps.facebook.com/researcher-profile/
2
www.umons.ac.be, www.evolumons.be
3
www.facebook.com
 New items of each kind can be added individually via dedicated
user interfaces (represented in different tabs in the application). For
bibliographic references, it is also possible to add them in batch, by
importing a BibTeX file containing all of them. In addition, sup-
port is provided to avoid introducing duplicate entries, and to map
author names to existing Facebook users. Available publications
in Researcher Profile can also be exported back into the BibTeX
format.
With all information stored in the database, the application can
generate individual researcher profiles. This is for example shown
in Figure 4 that displays the (still incomplete) research profile of
Tom Mens. Observe that an individual can belong to different
groups, and that his researcher profile combines all this informa-
tion on a single page.
Another typical feature of Web 2.0 applications is tagging. We
associate tags to each type of item, and use these tags to facilitate
retrieval of information. This is illustrated in Figure 5, showing a
cloud of tags (the size of each tag represents its popularity) and the
search results for the ‘refactoring’ tag.
4. VISUALISING THE RESEARCH COM-
MUNITY
Researcher Profile can be used to visualise all collaborations be-
tween different members of the research community in different
ways and according to different viewpoints.
From a geographical viewpoint (showing where a certain event
is taking place). Figure 6 illustrates this by displaying all events
organised by the research group on a Google map.
From a collaborative viewpoint (showing who is working with
who, irrespective of their geographical location). Figure 7 illus-
trates this by displaying a graph, generated using GraphViz4 , that
shows all collaborations (co-authorship or co-organisation) between
group members. Black edges stand for collaborations, red edges
stand for event organisations, weights are the numbers of collabo-
rations of each type.
From the viewpoint of a single individual’s collaborations, as op-
posed to the entire group’s. For example, while Figure 7 shows all
collaborations for the entire group, Figure 8 shows only the collab-
orations in which a single individual (in this case, Kim Mens) is
involved.
From an evolutionary viewpoint, by considering mainly the time
dimension. Figure 9 displays the history of all publications avail-
able for the group over time. This visualisation was made using
OpenFlashChart, an open source (LPGL licence) library based on
Adobe Flash capable of generating a wide variety of charts based
on external data. This visualisation enables group members to see
whether the activity of their community increases or decreases over
time. It could be used as a basis for discussion among group mem-
bers to revitalise their research activity, or to start exploring new
research domains.
From a gender or age viewpoint, Figure 10 displays the pop-
ulation of the group in terms of the age and gender of its indi-
viduals. It was also generated with OpenFlashChart. For privacy
reasons, individual members may decide not to specify their age
and/or gender. This explains the large fraction of ‘unset’ members
in Figure 10. For those individuals that have chosen to specify their
gender, we observe that the proportion of female members is very
low, as tends to be common in computer science research. A vi-
sualisation of the age distribution may be used to assess whether
the community contains a sufficient number of young researchers
to keep the research active.
4 9
www.graphviz.org/
146
All figures shown in this section have been generated based on
partial data, since the application was still in beta at the time of
writing (about 25 users added the application to their account). As
such, the current data set for the software evolution research com-
munity is very small and inevitably biased. The more persons in-
stall and contribute to the application, the more mature and reliable
the dataset will become.
5. LOOKING FORWARD
While Researcher Profile already contains a lot of useful func-
tionality, there is still plenty of room for improvement. For ex-
ample, we would like to synchronise our application with digital
libraries such as DBLP5 , the ACM Portal6 , CiteSeerX7 , Springer-
Link8 , in order to facilitate importing new data without too much
effort (e.g., one could automatically add all articles belonging to a
given conference such as ICSM).
Coming back to the ELSE virtual research environment men-
tioned in the introduction, we envision our application to become
a modular environment that can be extended by researchers with
dedicated analysis and evolution tools. This allows them to share
their research tools with other members as a kind of “software as a
service”.
The scalability of our application in terms of number of simul-
tenaous users, number of group members and size of the database
has not been stress-tested. Inevitably, some changes to the appli-
cation or the server on which it currently resides will be needed to
accomodate these issues.
In the future, it would be interesting to make the tool interopera-
ble with other social networks in a transparent way. As such, users
can “install” the application in their preferred social networking
tool, and be able to share their research profile with other group
members, even if these members use another social networking
tool. In that case, an extraction from Facebook would be required.
Another useful enhancement would be to offer a public API to
allow interested people/developers to query our data outside of the
application for other purposes.
Undoubtedly, there are many other interesting ways in which our
application can be extended to make it even more useful to the com-
munity. We therefore welcome any feedback and suggestions for
improvement.
Acknowledgements. I express my sincere gratitude to Pr. Tom
Mens for proposing and directing mymaster thesis, and helping me
all along the way. This research was carried out in the context of
FRFC project 2.4159.09 “Research Center on Software Adaptabil-
ity" financed by the F.R.S.-F.N.R.S.9
6. REFERENCES
[1] A. Malisart. Réseau social pour communautés de chercheurs,
développement d’une application pour la plate-forme
Facebook. Master’s thesis, Institut d’Informatique, Faculté des
Sciences, Université de Mons, June 2009.
[2] P. W. S. Cook, K. Nakata. European laboratory for software
evolution (ELSE): Vision statement. In Proc. EVOL 2008,
2008.
5
www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/
6
portal.acm.org
7
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/
8
springerlink.com
www.evolumons.be/FRFC
Figure 1: List of research publications of type "phdthesis" added to the research group.

Figure 2: List of research events added to the research group.

Figure 3: List of research projects added to the research group.

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Figure 4: Auto-generated research profile of a single individual, generated from information stored in the database. The profile
contains the results extracted from all research groups the researcher belongs to.

148
Figure 5: A cloud of used tags, and the result of showing all publications tagged with ‘refactoring’.

149
Figure 6: An auto-generated Google map showing the geographical locations where research events (workshops, seminars, confer-
ences and so on) have taken place.

Figure 7: A graph (generated with GraphViz) showing the collaborations between members of the research group. Black lines
represent co-authorship of publications. Red lines represent jointly organised events.

150
Figure 8: An graph (generated with GraphViz) showing the collaborations of a single individual (Kim Mens).

Figure 9: Historical view on all publications in the group, sorted by year from oldest to most recent.

151
Figure 10: Distribution of a group population according to age and gender.

152