Information Visualization for Searching and Browsing: Theories and Applications

Sponsored by SIG HCI

Xia Lin [Organizer]

Jin Zhang [Organizer, Moderator]

Javed Mostafa Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science, Bloomington, IN 47405-3907 Email: jm@indiana.edu

Allison Druin College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 Email: allisond@envoy.cs.umd.edu

Xia Lin College of Information Science & Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 191 04-2875 Email: linx@drexel.edu

Jin Zhang and Dietmar Wolfram School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 5321 1 Email: jzhang@uwm.edu, dwolfram@uwm.edu

There is a growing awareness that information visualization holds a great potential for effective information access. The challenge to realize the potential, however, is multi-fold. Advances are needed in various aspects of information visualization, including new metaphors for visual content representation, new methods for visual query construction, refinement and execution, new visual presentation to support human cognitive and perceptual activities, and new understanding of how to make information visually accessible to a variety of information seekers, from children to office workers.

This panel brings together information visualization researchers to discuss their recent research findings and address both theoretical and practice issues related to information visualization. Each presenter will discuss problems they attempt to solve, issues they encounter, and solutions they create and test.

Javed Mostafa will discuss the application of visualization methods in a bioinformation environment, from both theoretical and application perspectives. He will clarifL where visualization fits in the query defmition, execution, presentation, and refinement of the general information retrieval framework developed by Shneiderman, Byrd, and Croft.

the International Children's Digital Library (http://www.icdlbooks.org), a 5-year research project to develop a digital library for children (ages 3-13) with 10,000 books in at least 100 languages. For this research, children (ages 7- 1 1) have partnered with adults to develop interfaces to support children in searching, browsing, reading, and sharing books in electronic form.

Xia Lin will focus on visual content representation. He is developing systems that will automatically generate concept maps from literature databases. Issues to discuss include the validity, usability, and usefulness of using the concept maps as a graphical interface for searching and browsing.

Jin Zhang and Dietmar Wolfram will present their research results on the influence of term weighting methods and indexing characteristics on document spaces.

They will discuss the application of visualization for the exploration of visual document spaces associated under different term indexing characteristics (indexing exhaustivity and term frequency distributions) using several term weighting algorithms. In their research, the visualization system DARE was used to project the document spaces associated with each term indexing environment onto a two-dimensional space. The

Allison Druin will present various information differences of the resulting document space density (DSD - a measure of how tightly clustered documents are to one another) were compared. The fmdings demonstrate the

visualization techniques for children's access and use. She will present examples from her team's current research on

2004 Proceedings of the 67th ASIS&T Annual Meeting, vol. 41 591

impact of indexing characteristics on the nature of IR. in even larger DSD differences for the same environment. Variations in indexing exhaustivity and term frequency With an understanding of these characteristics, recom- distributions result in different DSDs, which impact mendations may be made for both automatic and manual retrieval effectiveness from a system perspective. indexing practice for IR systems. However, different term weighting algorithms will result

2004 Proceedings of the 67th ASIS&T Annual Meeting, vol. 41 592