PATTIE: Publication access through tiered interaction & exploration

In this work we present Publication Access Through Tiered Interaction & Exploration (PATTIE) - an information foraging, sense-making, and exploratory spatial-semantic information retrieval (IR) system (http://pattie.unc.edu/plos). Non-spatial, spatial IR systems, and some recent studies focused on their principal functions are discussed and compared. To interactively work through a use-case from the biomedical domain, instructions are provided for readers to conduct exploratory searches directly on the PLOS archive based on the software embedded in the online version of this paper (http://vzlib.unc.edu/software/). To carefully evaluate some of the critical parameters of the PATTIE algorithm, and the core functions of the implemented system, a set of experiments were conducted. Along with details on the experimental methods and their rationale, key findings from the experiments are analyzed and presented. Finally, with an eye toward the future of software-embedded scientific papers, their potential benefits for supporting direct engagement with scientific content, replication, and validation are discussed.