LabMaps#

Note

For small tests, we query both HAL and DBLP (default behavior), but for large retrievals we use HAL only, as it is faster.

Lab authors#

Lab authors are the main ingredient to analyse a single lab (i.e. a group of researchers). You can create one just with a name and then automatically ask to retrieve the DB endpoints for this author.

[1]:

from gismap.lab import LabAuthor

maria = LabAuthor("Maria Potop")
maria.auto_sources()

Let’s look at the sources:

[2]:

maria.sources

[2]:

[HALAuthor(name='Maria Potop', key='841868', key_type='pid'),
 DBLPAuthor(name='Maria Potop', key='p/MariaPotopButucaru')]

Note that an author can have many names.

[3]:

maria.aliases

[3]:

['Maria Gradinariu',
 'Maria Gradinariu Potop-Butucaru',
 'Maria Potop Butucaru',
 'Maria Potop-Butucaru']

When using auto_source, you can tell which DBs should be uses (only online DBLP and HAL are available right now).

[4]:

celine = LabAuthor("Céline Comte")
celine.auto_sources(dbs="dblp")
celine.sources

WARNING:GisMap:Connection error. Auto-retry in 6 seconds.

[4]:

[DBLPAuthor(name='Céline Comte', key='179/2173')]

[5]:

celine = LabAuthor("Céline Comte")
celine.auto_sources(dbs=["hal"])
celine.sources

[5]:

[HALAuthor(name='Céline Comte', key='celine-comte')]

When the sources of an author are set one can retrieve her publications.

[6]:

[p for p in celine.get_publications().values() if p.year == 2021]

[6]:

[SourcedPublication(title='Modèle de couplage stochastique non-biparti', authors=[LabAuthor(name='Céline Comte')], venue='ALGOTEL 2021 - 23èmes Rencontres Francophones sur les Aspects Algorithmiques des Télécommunications', type='conference', year=2021),
 SourcedPublication(title='Pass-and-Swap Queues', authors=[LabAuthor(name='Céline Comte'), HALAuthor(name='Jan-Pieter Dorsman', key='1098513', key_type='pid')], venue='Queueing Systems', type='journal', year=2021),
 SourcedPublication(title='Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Server Clusters: Insights From a Product-Form Queueing Model', authors=[HALAuthor(name='Mark van Der Boor', key='Mark van Der Boor', key_type='fullname'), LabAuthor(name='Céline Comte')], venue='2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQOS)', type='conference', year=2021),
 SourcedPublication(title='Performance Evaluation of Stochastic Bipartite Matching Models', authors=[LabAuthor(name='Céline Comte'), HALAuthor(name='Jan-Pieter Dorsman', key='1098513', key_type='pid')], venue='Performance Engineering and Stochastic Modeling', type='chapter', year=2021)]

Note

Lab authors can have metadata that can be used for display and further analysis. This is not covered in this tutorial.

Your first lab#

In GISMAP, a LabMap is a class whose instances have three methods:

  • update_authors automatically refresh the members of the lab. It is useful at creation or when a lab evolves.

  • update_publications makes a full refresh of the publications of a lab. All publications from lab members are considered (temporal filtering may be enabled later).

  • expand adds moons, i.e. additional researchers that gravitate around the lab.

The simplest usable subclass of Lab is ListMap, which uses a list of names. For example, consider the former team Gangsta from my Bell Labs days.

[7]:

from gismap.lab import ListMap

lab = ListMap(
    author_list=[
        "Fabien Mathieu",
        "Philippe Jacquet",
        "Alonso Silva",
        "Anne Bouillard",
        "François Durand (hal: fradurand)",
        "Amira Alloum",
        "Marc-Olivier Buob",
        "Mohamed Lamine Lamali",
    ],
    name="Gangsta",
    dbs="hal",
)
lab.update_authors()
lab.update_publis()
len(lab.publications)

[7]:

409

Maps can be saved withe the dump method so you don’t have to re-update them all the time.

When you have a populated lab, you can produce a standalone HTML of the collaboration graph with save_html. That graph is a standalone HTML that can be displayed in a notebook or saved for inclusion in a web page (e.g. with iframe).

You can also display it directly inside a notebook:

[8]:

lab.show_html()
© Gismap 2025

Let’s add some context with a few moons.

[9]:

lab.expand(target=4)

[10]:

lab.show_html()
© Gismap 2025

Few things about the generated graph:

  • Authors are represented with their initials unless some picture url is provided (implicitly or explictly).

  • Comets are singletons (authors with no co-publications with the other nodes). They are hidden by default. For example, if you only show the moons, Bernard becomes a comet and is hidden.

  • You can hover an author to get her name. If you click, you have a modal with the list of publications.

  • The width and length of an edge depend on the number of co-publications. If you click you have a modal with the list of co-publications.

Make your own LabMap#

Gismap is intended to make easy the creation of LabMaps in many contexts.

The easiest way to manage a lab, apart from using ListMaps as shown above, is to specify an internal method _author_iterator that returns Lab authors. When it’s done, you can create/refresh LabMaps as you see fit.

How the iterator works is 100% up to you. Most of the time, this is done by scrapping some Web page(s) (see the gallery for examples), but many other options exist, e.g. read authors from a file, from a LDAP…

For example, this is the entire code required for handling the Solace team.