Discovering research trends in the computer science area of Ecuador: an approach using semantic knowledge bases

Abstract

We present a study of research trends for the area of Computer Sciences in Ecuador in recent years. This analysis was performed through a new method that leverages on semantic web technologies and external knowledge bases (i.e. DBpedia and UNESCO nomenclature) for identifying research topics within articles' metadata. This information takes into account the documents' publication date in order to construct time series which are analyzed and interpreted looking for trends. Concretely, we focused our study on the REDI (Semantic Repository of Ecuadorian Researchers) knowledge base which compiles most of the scholarly assets produced in Ecuador and more specifically on the Computer Science subset of publications. This study found that most of the research topics have shown an steady growth in the volume of publications over time, whereas the Semantic Web and E-Government research topics had a great impact initially and now have been slightly reducing its share in favor of new topics such as Information Integration, Machine Learning and Data Mining.