Braided chord diagrams
  The notion of a braided chord diagram is introduced and studied. An equivalence relation is given which identifies all braidings of a fixed chord diagram. It is shown that finite-type invariants are stratified by braid index for knots which can be represented as closed 3-braids. Partial results are obtained about spanning sets for the algebra of chord diagrams of braid index 3. 
Joan S. Birman (Columbia University), Rolland Trapp