Discovery Portal

The Posters.science discovery portal enables users to search, explore, and access publicly shared scientific posters through advanced search capabilities and AI-powered discovery tools.

Overview

The discovery portal allows searching through publicly shared posters. Meilisearch powers search functionality with full-text queries and filtered searches (author, year, conference). When viewing a poster, users see structured metadata, abstract, and a link to the repository file. Redis caches frequent queries for performance. The platform supports user-driven feedback for metadata corrections and contributions.

Search Capabilities

Traditional Search

• Full-Text Search: Search across poster content and metadata
• Faceted Filtering: Filter by author, year, conference, repository
• Sorting Options: Relevance, date, title, author
• Search Suggestions: Auto-complete and query suggestions

AI-Enhanced Discovery (Planned)

Coming Soon

Smart Search and AI-enhanced discovery features are under active development and not yet available.

• Natural Language Queries: Conversational search interface
• Contextual Understanding: Semantic search capabilities
• Related Content: AI-powered recommendations

Smart Search (Planned)

Smart Search will enable natural language questions with AI-generated summaries and links to relevant posters. The planned Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline:

1. Embeds user queries
2. Performs vector similarity search against pre-computed poster embeddings in the database
3. Retrieves the top relevant posters
4. Passes them as context to an LLM for response generation

Planned Architecture

• Vector storage: pgvector (PostgreSQL extension) with HNSW indexing for fast approximate nearest-neighbor search
• Search integration: Meilisearch for hybrid keyword + vector retrieval
• Response generation: LLM model selection in progress

Overview Page Analytics (Planned)

Planned

The Overview page and its visualizations are under active development.

The Overview page will provide visualizations of database trends and patterns:

• Poster Growth Over Time: time-series chart of monthly registrations
• Top Institutions: bar chart of institutions with the most posters
• Research Domain Distribution: treemap showing poster distribution across fields
• Conference Landscape: network graph mapping the conference ecosystem
• Funding Landscape: Sankey diagram showing funder-to-domain flows
• Geographic Distribution: world map with choropleth coloring
• Collaboration Network: force-directed graph of inter-institutional collaborations

Technical Implementation

Search Engine

• Meilisearch: Fast, typo-tolerant search

Performance Optimization

• Redis Caching: Frequent query caching
• Client-side Caching: Browser storage optimization