  The TERRE-ISTEX project aims at identifying the evolution of research working
relation to study areas, disciplinary crossings and concrete research methods
based on the heterogeneous digital content available in scientific corpora. The
project is divided into three main actions: (1) to identify the periods and
places which have been the subject of empirical studies, and which reflect the
publications resulting from the corpus analyzed, (2) to identify the thematics
addressed in these works and (3) to develop a web-based geographical
information retrieval tool (GIR). The first two actions involve approaches
combining Natural languages processing patterns with text mining methods. By
crossing the three dimensions (spatial, thematic and temporal) in a GIR engine,
it will be possible to understand what research has been carried out on which
territories and at what time. In the project, the experiments are carried out
on a heterogeneous corpus including electronic thesis and scientific articles
from the ISTEX digital libraries and the CIRAD research center.
