Software engineer from Hungary picks up $10,000 prize for visualising data connections

Balazs Godeny, a software engineer from Hungary, has won $10,000 USD from Thomson Reuters for an application that visually emphasises the data connections with the Web of Knowledge. 

This prize comes from Thomson Reuters' Build Challenge, the second phase of a  contest designed to expand the discovery experience offered by Web of Knowledge. The competition challenged the research community to develop innovative visualisation tools to illustrate the connections found in data, citations and research by using Web of Knowledge application programming interfaces (APIs).

Godeny's solution allows users to view a set of documents within the Web of Knowledge by searching for specific keywords. It then displays connection points or “nodes” linking to relevant keywords within other documents, creating a visual web to easily show links between research data and to expand the search and discovery process. The winning submission included a workable code for the application and a detailed whitepaper explaining its structure and use.

'Since search and discovery is changing at such a rapid pace, I wanted to enhance the way researchers interact with and utilise data,' explained Godeny. 'By emphasising connections in and the significance of research through my application, search and discovery becomes more meaningful and navigable.'

In the Build Challenge Thomson Reuters, in partnership with crowdsourcing company InnoCentive, called upon the research community to develop new and inventive ways for users to interact with the content and tools in the Web of Knowledge. The Ideation Challenge, the first part of the programme, attracted over 830 solvers from around the world and received 177 submissions proposing innovative approaches for expanding the discovery experience within the Web of Knowledge. The top three winners received monetary prizes. The Build Challenge then tasked the technologists within the scholarly community to develop visual realisations of the data within the Web of Knowledge, the dominant theme of the Ideation Challenge’s top submissions. The winning application was chosen from among 15 submissions.