JISC is offering
£5,000 to student teams to develop technology to improve student research. One of the ideas seems particularly interesting in terms of research visualization:
WikiNets is an online tool for piecing together contribution of many researchers into a graphical form that is easy to read and remember. The tool does this by allowing collaborative creation of annotated networks that represent all relevant variables in a domain of research and their relationships. From the presentation webpage: "
Imagine a streamlined Wikipedia, built to focus on the links."