Visualisation and Analysis of Affiliation Networks as Tools to Describe Professional Profiles

The analysis of professional profiles is both a crucial and a challenging issue: professional profiles evolve over time, especially in the forefront fields. The interrelations between working activities and professional profiles can be seen as an affiliation network, where a set of actors (activities) co-participates in a set of events (professions); the same is true with the relation between competencies and professions. The techniques developed to analyse and represent affiliation networks can then be applied to the analysis of professional profiles. This paper discusses the application of some techniques developed to analyse and represent affiliation networks to the analysis of professional profiles, with an example on the professional profiles operating in the Research and Development (R&D) field.