InfoSky, one of the popular information visualization tools allows one to visualize thousands of archived documents in the form of galaxies. This representation allows the user to easily navigate to the desired topic. This presentation gives an overview of InfoSky Tool, its predecessors, its characteristics etc. It also gives a note about how its prototype model performed no better than the conventional Tree Browser due to low training time given to the subjects of the experiment.

1. ARCHIVAL
GALAXIES
Steffi Keran Rani J
M.E. MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY
ANNA UNIVERSITY

2. InfoSky
Designed and Implemented by a team from
Known-Centre Graz
Hyperwave and
Graz University of Technology, Austria
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Case Study

3. 1
Large Collection of
Documents
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4. “ To illustrate the value of Information Visualization for Exploration
and searching of Document collections
 To show the value of Specialized Algorithms to organize data
spatially.
 The design of the Visualization Tool depends on the Nature of a
Task
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5. 2
Background and
Requirements
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6.  Collection of 109,000 German language
news articles.
 Classified into 6900 collections and sub-
collections
 Arranged in a hierarchical structure with 15
levels.
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7. REQUIREMENTS
1. Scalability
Should be easy to visualize hierarchically structured
repositories containing 100s of 1000s and even millions of
documents
2. Hierarchy plus similarity
Should represent the relationships and similarities between the
documents in the hierarchical structure
3. Focus + Context
Integrate both a global and a local view of the Information
Space
4. Stability
Promote visual recall and recognition of features.
Representation should remain unchanged at a global level
even if local level changes happen in the underlying repository
5. Exploration
Interactions in both searching and browsing the repository
should be intuitive
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8. 3
Earlier Work
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9. Earlier Works
1. BEAD
2. SPIRE
3. Hyperbolic Browser
4. Cone Tree
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10. “ Documents were automatically clustered according to their
keywords
 These clusters were displayed in a 2.5 D landscape with meta
keywords indicating categories
 No manual classification
 No hierarchical relationships
 Raw data is an unstructured repository
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1. BEAD (Chalmers, 1993)

11. A landscape representation of data about a collection of documents
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12. “ Documents which are close in high – dimensional thematic space
are automatically transformed to be close in 2D space
 Theme strength is indicated by Elevation
 Operations are performed on flat, unstructured repositories
 Hierarchical relations are not exploited
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2. SPIRE (Wise et al, 1995)

13. A themescape representation of 700 articles related to the financial industry
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14. “ Interactive representation of a hierarchical system
 Permits smooth exploration and directed movement within the hierarchy
 Distortion allows the user to focus on a selected region of the tree, while
keeping sight of the context
 Content, keywords and relationship between documents are taken into
account ONLY for a priori hierarchical organizations
 No search facility offered (though could be incorporated!)
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3. HYPERBOLIC BROWSER
(Lamping and Rao 1994)

15. Hyperbolic Browser
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16. http://portal.mace‐project.eu
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17. “ Hierarchical system
 No means to focus on Regions of Interest
 Content, keywords and relationship between documents ARE
NOT TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT !
 Supports Interaction and Search facility
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4. CONE TREE
(Robertson et al., 1991)

18. The cone tree, tilted to allow the text associated with each node to be readable.
Selective distortion could be applied to allow focus on any part18

19. 4
Design Decisions
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20. Metaphors Used
▪ Galaxy of Stars → Repository & its component documents
▪ Star → Document
▪ Telescope → Variable magnification , enhanced by Semantic
Zoom
▪ Facilitates exploration of Galaxy at any level of detail
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21. View of the entire Galaxy, showing collection boundaries and titles at the top level
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22. 22

23. 5
Interaction and
Search
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24. Interaction and Search
▪ Interaction with galaxy is simple and consistent at all levels
▪ Left Mouse Click (on a title) → Semantic zoom to the next lower level
▪ Holding down → Continues the semantic zoom
▪ Right Mouse Click → Reverses the zoom
▪ On receipt of a keyword, relevant regions and documents are
highlighted in YELLOW
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25. 25

26. The result of clicking on the title Bayern. The mouse now hovers over Wirtschaftsraum
Bayern26

27. The result of selecting Wirtschaftsraum Bayern
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28. At the lowest level titles are visible
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29. Highlighting of both relevant regions and documents follows the entry of a
keyword29

30. 6
Layout
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31. “Piecewise linear boundaries defining the collections at each level of hierarchy is
determined by two factors:
1. Size of each Polygonal Region
Proportional to the number of subordinate documents in that
collection
2. Position of the Centroid of each region
Influenced by the similarity between the documents within the sub-
collections
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32. Representation of collections at two levels of the hierarchy and, for the lower level, the
layout of the collections (A, B, C, etc.) and their centroids (C1, C2, C3)32

33. 7
Evaluation
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34. Evaluation
2 sets of 5 tasks
8 subjects (2 groups)
80 task solutions
InfoSky vs Tree Viewer
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35. Evaluation
▪ Initially compared with Conventional Tree Viewer
▪ Later, Prototype InfoSky Tool ( TeleScope Browser TS) was evaluated
against Tree Viewer (TV)
▪ Two sets of tasks
▪ 2 mins introduction to TS was given before experiment
▪ Search facility not to be used
▪ Actions of the subjects were videotaped and interviews took place
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36. 36
Alas!
TV performed better than TS(InfoSky)

37. Explanations given by Developers
▪ Evaluation was done on a prototype
▪ Unfamiliar controls and metaphors
▪ Values of TV browser were not checked
▪ Searchfacility and Concurrent use of both browsers were not permitted
▪ Results, after all, are not discouraging
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38. References
▪ Robert Spence, “Information Visualization : An Introduction” 2014
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