Hi Kim,

> What I'd like to do is use an interactive visualization on our web site that will allow researchers to find each other. I want to "tag" the researchers according to their areas of study (I can develop a taxonomy here), affiliated institution, what years they attended our annual conference, etc.

that’s indeed a very interesting project. We’ve done something similar for a local research centre, using a very good data pool of visits / conference attendance / coauthorship / joint projects and the GraphViz software to create a force-directed graph putting people who work together close to each other.

The results seemed good in the sense that the overall structure was correctly reflected and cooperations were neatly visualised. However, the graph needed quite a bit of tweaking to look tidy and good (removing overlaps etc) and the software cannot create animations to visualise changes in the network.

That's probably not exactly what you are looking for, but it sounds similar enough to be potentially interesting.

Regards

	Sven

-- 
Sven-S. Porst
SUB Göttingen, Bibliothekssysteme
Zimmer 2.38 . Platz der Göttinger Sieben 1 .  D-37073 Gö . +49-551-39x4255