UMLS semantic type clouds

I'm trying to understand the relationship between tags used to describe academic citations by researchers and the descriptors used to describe the same citations by the pros. To do so, I've been trying to get a grasp of the differences at a level up from strings using tools from Unified Medical Language System. Right now I'm having my doubts about whether this is really going anywhere. There are differences, to be sure, but I'm not convinced right now that they are really meaningful. If the data you see below says something to you, I'd be obliged if you could tell me what it said. You should be able to access it in raw form in my newly generated area of the Many Eyes website.

The following tag clouds were generated for the terms used to describe about 87,000 Pubmed citations using Many Eyes. Each tag in the cloud corresponds to a UMLS semantic type. For the first cloud, the types are related to the MeSH descriptors associated with the citations. For the second cloud, the types are related to the tags added by Connotea users to the same citations. There is some bias here for the Connotea tags because I only considered tags for which I could rapidly, computationally identify a matching UMLS concept with high precision - so many of the tags aren't actually represented in the cloud. 'Functional concept' seems to be a standout for Connotea. It represents "a concept which is of interest because it pertains to the carrying out of a process or activity". There is a wordle with the Connotea tags that linked to functional concepts at the bottom.

Connotea tags below, MeSH terms above

Connotea tags for functional concepts below.

one more sci foo tag cloud

Alright, I know this is getting a bit old now, but I read this summative post about the meeting by Frank Wilczek (I got the first signed copy of his new book ;) and thought it would make a much more descriptive cloud than the ones I put together during the meeting about the attendees and their ideas for sessions.  So, here is yet another wordle-generated scifoo cloud based on Frank's post.  (It is better if you click through to the larger image).

scifoo session suggestion wiki tag cloud

Here is a tag cloud from the session suggestions page. Again, the length of the page makes it difficult to get a grasp of everything all at once, so the tag cloud gives a nice, quick feeling for what is happening.

scifoo attendee tag cloud

To get a feeling for the way scifooers describe their work and themselves, I used Wordle to create this tag cloud from the attendee page of the scifoo wiki.



(click for larger view)

Pretty Paper

Check out this visualization of the paper I'm working on at the moment. Very pretty, but I wish I could make the words link to something to make it more active and exploratory. Make your own at wordle.net. (Thanks to Egon for the tip).