Abstract. Reading and literature exploration are important tasks of scientific research. However, conventional retrieval systems provide limited support for these tasks by concentrating on identifying relevant materials. New generation systems should provide additional support functionality by focusing on analyzing and organizing the retrieved materials. A framework of literature exploration support systems is proposed. Techniques of granular computing are used to construct granular knowledge structures from the contents, structures, and usages of scientific documents. The granular knowledge structures provide a high level understanding of scientific literature and hints regarding what has been done and what needs to be done. As a demonstration, we examine granular knowledge structures obtained from an analysis of papers from two rough sets related conferences.

In this paper, we propose Cognitive Process-Based Research Support System (CPBRSS) to be a practical investigation for Web based Information Retrieval Support System (WIRSS). With the philosophy of making a balance between automation and human problem solving, the strategy of integrating Web Intelligence (WI for short) and human decision making drives the full process of scientific research in the new information age. Considering the nature commonalities shared by Granular Computing (GrC for short) and human understanding of the physical world, we use GrC to model the whole system. We hope it will be an effective platform to scientific research and a good investigation on building Intelligent Web Information System (IWIS) to explore the practical goal of WI. 1.