Evolving the Web for Scientific Knowledge: First Steps Towards an "HCI Knowledge Web"

In this article, I consider the challenge of building a Web-based infrastructure for scholarly research which moves beyond the basic dissemination and linking of documents, to support more powerful searching and analysis of the cumulative knowledge in the literature1s documents. Taking the HCI research community as an example, the goal would be to enable HCI researchers to search for interesting documents and phenomena, and discover previously unknown but conceptually related research, for instance, other groups addressing persistent problems in the field, the structure of debates, or when and how new theoretical perspectives began to make an impact. I propose that focusing on the scientific relationships between documents is important, and has advantages as the basis for a Web metadata scheme to enrich the HCI community1s Web.