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Traditional information retrieval systems present search results as a ranked list of documents, ordered by their estimated relevance to the query. Visualization of search results is emerging as a powerful tool for presenting more information to the user in a way that is both intuitive and easy to interpret. This paper describes the various visualization techniques, and presents a novel classification of these methods. Next it discusses several of the important issues concerning these techniques: how they are evaluated, how they scale to large document sets, can they be combined, and will we see them in practice on the Web anytime soon. 1

Current user interfaces of full text retrieval systems do not help in the process of filtering the result of a query, usually very large. We address this problem and we propose a visual interface to handle the result of a query, based on a hybrid model for text. This graphical user interface provides several visual representations of the answer and its elements (queries, documents, and text), easing the analysis and the filtering process. Keywords: visual browsing, visual text databases, visual tools, visual representations, visual query languages, set visualization, visual analysis. 1 Introduction Full text retrieval systems are a popular way of providing support for on-line text. Their advantage is that they avoid the complicated and expensive process of semantic indexing. From the end-user point of view, full text searching of on-line documents is appealing because a valid query is just any word or sentence of the document. However, there is no standard query language despite the ...

Although many different visual information retrieval systems have been proposed, few have been tested, and where testing has been performed results were often inconclusive. Further, there is very little evidence of benchmarking systems against a common standard. An approach for testing novel interfaces is proposed which uses bottom-up, stepwise testing to allow evaluation of a visualization, itself, rather than restricting evaluation to the system instantiating it. This approach not only makes it easier to control variables, but the tests are also easier to perform. The methodology will be presented through a case study, where a new visualization technique is compared to more traditional ways of presenting data. 1

visual retrieval model

Digital library search results are usually shown as a textual list, with 10-20 items per page. Viewing several thousand search results at once on a two-dimensional display with continuous variables is a promising alternative. Since these displays can overwhelm some users, we created a simplified two-dimensional display that uses categorical and hierarchical axes, called hietaxes. Users appreciate the meaningful and limited number of terms on each hieraxis. At each grid point of the display we show a cluster of color- coded dots or a bar chart. Users see the entire result set and can then click on labels to move down a level in the hierarchy. Handling broad hierarchies and arranging for imposed hierarchies led to additional design innovations. We applied hieraxes to a digital video library of science topics used by middle school teachers, a legal information system, and a technical library using the ACM Computing Classification System. Feedback from usability testing with 32 subjects revealed strengths and weaknesses.

This paper will discuss methods for exhaustively testing the capabilities of a visualization by mapping from a domain-independent taxonomy of visual tasks to a speci"c domain, i.e. information retrieval. Experimental results are presented illustrating this approach to determining the role visualizations may play in supporting users in information-seeking environments. Our methods could easily be extended to other domains including data visualization