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Project Progress

AIRFrame analyzes published and unpublished documents to identify and visualize implicit relationships between astrobiology’s diverse constituent fields. The main goals of AIRFrame are to allow researchers and the public to discover related information from different disciplines, and to provide a metric of interdisciplinary science.

During the reporting period, AIRFrame has evolved from a conceptual system to a modular suite of tools, methods and technologies designed to represent researcher output accurately, integrate documents from diverse sources, and triangulate best practices. We modeled the output of astrobiology researchers primarily in two ways: by analyzing the full text of annual reports and publications from each NAI team, and by representing the publications of a single team (UHNAI) by both the abstracts of published articles, and the abstracts of the papers they cite. Our initial results suggest that a balance of both approaches can be used to identify crossover documents, potential collaborations between researchers, and to provide a metric of interdisciplinarity at the level of an NAI team, a scientist and an individual paper. Refining these results will allow us to evaluate the extent to which NAI goals and sub-goals from the Astrobiology Roadmap are being addressed by NAI research output. We have also investigated the public perception of astrobiology in social media, to inform public outreach and to create new connections between astrobiology and computer science.