As part of Team Knowledge Direct I designed a web app which, given your current knowledge and what you want to learn, provides a path through the academic literature to get you there - perfect for becoming familiar with a new field without wasting lots of time getting lost down dead ends!
Think of all possible knowledge as a high dimensional hyperspace. Any publication will occupy some subspace of this hyperspace. Conventional literature searches provide the publications that intersect some subspace, usually defined by a keywords. More recent social media/bot approaches try to interpret the subspace the user is familiar with and suggest publications that exist at or just outside the boundary of this familiarity. Our service provides a means of bridging between the subspace of knowledge which the user knows and their search subspace. This is done by presenting the minimum necessary publications required for the user to traverse between these subsapces.
Shout out to my great team mates Jeremy, Veronika and Jack.
Check it out on Github!