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Chapter 15: Information
Search & Visualization
Team 3: Jacob Hicks, Victor Chen, Saba Alavi
Introduction
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Information exploration overload/anxiety?
Object-actions Interface (OAI) model helps by:
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N00bs in an information-exploration system…
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separating different task concepts
separating high-level interface issues from low level interface
issues
struggle to understand what they see whilst remembering their information
needs
might be distracted by learning complex query languages/elaborate shapecoding rules
need direct-manipulation designs/simple visual-coding rules (low cognition)
can request additional features by adjusting control panels
Experienced users want more functionality and power:
a wider range of search tools, lots of options
Introduction (cont’d)
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Task objects represented by interface objects in
structured relational databases or text/media document
libraries
Structured relational databases made up of relations
and a schema (model) to describe relations
Relations have items (tuples/records), which consist of
multiple atomic attributes, each of which have attribute
values
Textual document library comprised of collections and
descriptive attributes (e.g. location, media type,
curator, donor, etc.)
Introduction (cont’d)
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Multimedia document library same as
textual document library, only instead of text,
it’s media: images, sound, video, animations,
etc.
 Task actions (i.e. fact finding) decomposed
into browsing/searching, represented by
interface actions (i.e. scrolling, zooming,
joining, linking)
 Finding aids help users focus their info needs
(i.e. table of contents, indices, abstracts, etc)
Database Query/Phrase Search
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SQL a widespread standard for searching in
structured relational database systems
Requires substantial time investment to learn
Computer’s capacity for responding to natural
language query often limited
Tradeoff exists between ease of use and
usefulness
Empirical studies illustrate better performance
and more satisfaction when users are able to
view and control the search
Database Query/Phrase Search
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Improved designs & consistency across
differing systems allows for faster
performance, fewer mistakes, and more
successful searches
 Recommends four phase framework:
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Formulation – expressing the search
Initiation of the action – launching the search
Review of results
Refinement – formulating the next step
Multimedia Document Searches
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Current approaches to locating media rely on parallel databases
and document searches
Advocates for ambitions captioning and attribute recording
Classification according to useful search categories useful,
though costly and imperfect
Graphical specification of query components:
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Photo search
Map Search
Design/diagram search
Sound search
Video Search
Animation Search
Information Visualization
 Bandwidth
of vision is high
 Overview first, zoom and filter, then
details on demand.
 Data type by task
1-D Linear
 Text
documents
 Source Code
 Bifocal Display
 Value Bars
2-D Map
 Maps
 Floorplans
 Newspaper
layouts
3D World
 Real
objects, models, ect.
 Must keep track of position orientation
 Occlusion
Temporal data
 Time
lines
 1D linear
 Start and finish time
 Events may overlap
Multidimesional data
 n-dimensional
space
 Databases with n attributes
 Can be 2D or 3D
 Scattergrams
Tree data
 Hierarchies
 Can
be shown as lines and nodes
 Tabbed text files
 Cones in 3D
Network data
 Networks
 Cannot
be written as a tree
 Node-and-link
 Square matrix
Overview Task
 Movable
field of view
 3 to 30 zoom amount
 Fisheye
Zoom task
 View
a specific area in detail
 Smooth zooming preserves orientation
 “A satisfying way to zoom in is to point to
a location and to issue a zooming
command”
Filter task
 Remove
unwanted items
 Widgets to regulate process
 Dynamic control of items
Details-on-demand task
 Select
item or group to get details
 Click on an item to get popup window
Relate task
 View
relationships amoung items
 Select an item to highlight related items
History task
 Keep
history to support undo
 Tasks from the past combinded
Extract Task
 Extraction
of subcollection of parameters
 Allow to save the records that result from
a search
 Save settings
Advanced Filtering
Dynamic queries
 Numeric range sliders
 Alphasliders for names
 Bottons for small sets of categories
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Commercial Information–retrieval
systems
Example – DIALOG or First Search
 Permit complex Boolean expressions
with parentheses but they are difficult to
use
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When we say or in English it means
not both, but in Boolean OR is inclusive .
 New York and Boston ( result 0 )
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Another form of filtering …
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Apply a user-constructed set of
keywords to dynamically generated
information. Such as incoming email
messages…..
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A social form of filtering is collaborative
filtering ….. Music, Restaurants ..
Summary
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Improved user interface to traditional
databese-query or multimedia-document
search will spawn appealing new products.
The more Flexible the better…
15.7 Search in complex structured
documents. graphics, images, sound or
video persents grand opportunities for the
design of advanced user interfaces and
powerful search engines .