InfoSky

Authors

• Michael Granitzer
  
• Wolfgang Kienreich
  
• Keith Andrews
  
• Vedran Sabol
  
• Werner Klieber
  

Short description

The InfoSky visual explorer is a system enabling users to interactively explore large, hierarchically structured document collections. Similar to a real-world telescope, InfoSky employs a planar graphical representation with variable magnification. Documents of similar content are placed close to each other and displayed as stars, while collections of documents at a particular level in the hierarchy are visualised as bounding polygons. Usability testing of an early prototype implementation of InfoSky revealed several design issues which prevented users from fully exploiting the power of the visual metaphor. Evaluation results have been incorporated into an advanced prototype, and another usability test has been conducted. A comparison of test results demonstrates enhanced system performance and points out promising directions for further work.

[Michael Granitzer et al., Evaluating a System for Interactive Exploration of large, Hierarchically Structured Document Repositorieset, IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2004]

Suitable Datatypes

Suitable Datatypes for this information visualization technique are hierarchical information structures. The goal of InfoSky is to reduce the complexity of large amounts of text-data (for examples collections of newspaper articles) by presenting it through the metapher of a telescope view in a hierarchically structured form. Text-data can be either Word documents, PDF or HTML files.

Figures

Pictures of the InfoSky Browser

InfoSky

Examples and use cases

Layout of a simple Cone Tree [Robertson et al., 1991]

Cat-a-Cone: An Interactive Interface for Specifying Searches and Viewing Retrieval Results using a Large Category Hierarchy
[Hearst and Karadi, 1997]

The Cat-a-Cone is a novel user interface that integrates search and browsing of very large category hierarchies with their associated text collections. One key insight is the separation of the representation of category labels from documents, which allows the display of multiple categories per document. Another key component is the display of multiple selected categories simultaneously, complete with their hierarchical context. Shown are the results of a search on category labels Mastectomy and Radiation Therapy in conjunction with the text word "lumpectomy" on a breast cancer subset of the MEDLINE collection. A ConeTree displays category labels and a WebBook shows retrieval results. The lefthand page shows the title and the category labels associated with the document. The righthand page shows the abstract associated with the document.

[Hearst and Karadi, 1997]

Lyberworld [Hemmje, 1994]

LyberWorld is a 3D visualization user interface supporting fulltext retrieval.

A file-system displayed as cone-tree

Evaluation

• Andrew Cockburn
  
• Bruce McKenzie
  

References

• [Robertson et al., 1991] George Robertson, Jock D. Mackinlay, Stuart Card. Cone Trees: Animated 3D Visualizations of Hierarchical Information. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference, pages 189-- 194, April 28 - June 5, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1991. Association for Computing Machinery
  

Evaluation References

• [Cockburn and McKenzie, 2000] Andrew Cockburn and Bruce McKenzie. An Evaluation of Cone Trees. In People and Computers XIV: British Computer Society Conference on Human Computer Interaction 2000, p425--436. Springer-Verlag.
  
  

• [Hearst and Karadi, 1997] Marti A. Hearst and Chandu Karadi. Cat-a-Cone: An Interactive Interface for Specifying Searches and Viewing Retrieval Results using a Large Category Hierarchy. In Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference, pages 246-- 255, Philadelphia, PA, July 1997

• [Hemmje, 1994] Matthias Hemmje, LyberWorld - A 3D Graphical User Interface for Fulltext Retrieval. Created at: May 7-11 1995. Retrieved at: April 13, 2006. http://delivery.acm.org/...