This paper proposes a user interface for remote access of the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human digital image library. Users can visualize the library, browse contents, locate data of interest, and retrieve desired images. The interface presents a pair of tightly coupled views into the library data. The overview image provides a global view of the overall search space, and the preview image provides details about high resolution images available for retrieval. To explore, the user sweeps the views through the search space and receives smooth, rapid, visual feedback of contents. Desired images are automatically downloaded over the internet from the library. Library contents are indexed by meta-data consisting of automatically generated miniature visuals. The interface software is completely functional and freely available for public use, at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/. Keywords: Browsing, Digital Library, Image Database, Information Exploration, Information Retrieval, Internet,...

We report on the design and evaluation of a visualization tool for Information Retrieval (IR) systems that aims to help the end user in the following respects: . As an indicator of document relevance, the tool graphically provides specific query related information about individual documents . As a diagnosis tool, it graphically provides aggregate information about the query results that could help in identifying how the different query terms influence the retrieval and ranking of documents. Two different experiments using TREC-4 data were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this tool. Results, while mixed, indicate that visualization of this sort may provide useful support for judging the relevance of documents, in particular by enabling users to make more accurate decisions about which documents to inspect in detail. Problems in evaluation of such tools in interactive environments are discussed. 1 Introduction The disadvantages of Boolean IR systems are well known. Best-matc...

The idea of Information Visualization is to get insights into great amounts of abstract data. Especially document sets found by searching the World Wide Web are a special challenge. The paper gives a short overview on the variety of possible visualizations for this application area. The presented ideas are grouped by using the four phase framework of information seeking. Crucial factors for the success of visualizations are discussed. An approach is presented to use alternative simple visualizations, grouped around the traditional result-list, for the usage with a local meta web search engine.

The WWW is the most important resouree for external business information. This paper presents a tool called INSYDER, an information assistant for finding and analysing business information from the WWW. INSYDER is a system using different agents for crawling the Web, evaluating and visualising the results. These agents, the used visualisafions, and a first summary of user studies are presented. Keywords Uls/visualization organizing and displaying retrieval results, (semi) automated search assistants, user studies 1

Companies, government agencies, and other types of organizations are making their large data available to the world over the Internet. Current front-ends rarely give users information about the contents of the data. This leads many users to waste time and network resources posing queries that have either zero-hit or mega-hit result sets. Query previews form a novel visual approach for browsing large data collections. Query previews supply data distribution information to the users and give continuous feedback about the size of the result set as the query is being formed. On the other hand, initial designs of query previews used only a few pre-selected attributes. The distribution information was displayed only on these attributes. Unfortunately, many data sets are formed of numerous tables and attributes. This paper introduces a generalization of query previews. We allow users to visually browse multiple tables and attributes from a data set using a hierarchical browser. Any of the attributes can be used to display the distribution information, making query previews applicable to many public online data sets.

We present a new visualization approach for metadata combining different visualizations into a so-called SuperTable accompanied by a Scatterplot. The goal is to improve user experience during the information seeking process. Our new visualizations are based on our experiences developing a visual information retrieval system called INSYDER to supply small and medium size enterprises with business information from the Internet. Based on extensive user tests the original visualizations have been redesigned in two different design variants. Instead of offering multiple visualizations to choose from the SuperTable + Scatterplot combines them in a new way. Therefore, the user has the feeling that he is working with one single visualization in different states. Further the SuperTable solves a problem which seemed to be immanent to visualizations in document retrieval: the change of modalities.

The idea of Information Visualization is to get insights into great amounts of abstract data. Especially document sets found by searching the World Wide Web are a special challenge. The paper gives a short overview on the variety of possible visualizations for this application area. Crucial factors for the success of visualizations are discussed. A combined approach is presented to use alternative simple visualizations, grouped around the traditional result-list, for usage with a local meta web search engine.

Abstract. Networked and local data exploration systems that use command languages, menus, or form fillin interfaces rarely give users an indication of the distribution of data. This often leads users to waste time, posing queries that have zero-hit or mega-hit results. Query previews are a novel visual approach for browsing databases. Query previews supply users with data distribution information for selected attributes of the database, and give continuous feedback about the size of the result set as the query is being formed. Subsequent refinements might be necessary to narrow the search. Because there is a risk that query previews are an additional step, leading to a more complex and slow search process, we ran a within subjects empirical study with 12 subjects who used interfaces with and without query previews and with minimized network delays. Even with 12 subjects and minimized network delays we found statistically significant differences showing that query previews could speed up performance 1.6 to 2.1 times and lead to higher user satisfaction. 1.

We describe the design of an User Interface for a ranked output Information Retrieval system that integrates querying, navigation and visualization in a seamless fashion. Highlights of the system include the following: ffl Using a visualization scheme, the interface provides visual feedback to the user about how the query words influence the ranking of retrieved documents. ffl By simple drag-and-drop operations of objects on the screen, the interface facilitates a naive end-user in constructing complex structured queries and in providing relevance feedback. ffl To suit the evolving information needs of the user, the interface supports navigational features such as browsing documents by specific authors and browsing the Table of Contents of publications. ffl The interface integrates an online thesaurus which provides words related to the query that can be used by the user to expand the original query. By providing a rich set of features, the interface coherently supports a wide spect...

In this paper we present the conception and the evaluation of a visual information retrieval system for the Web. Our work has been motivated by the lack of good user interfaces assisting the user in searching the Web. The selected visualisations and the reasons why they have been chosen are explained in detail. An evaluation of these visualisations as an add-on to the traditional result list is presented.