4th READING ASSIGNMENT

4th READING ASSIGNMENT

TITLE: Interactive 3D Visualization for Document Retrieval
AUTHORS: John Cugini, Dr. Christine Piatko, and Dr. Sharon Laskowski
SOURCE: http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/vvrg/cugini/uicd/viz.html

ABSTRACT:

The availability of large collections of documents coupled with powerful search and retrieval algorithms provides the opportunity for people to access large sets of relevant documents in electronic form. However, often a user query can result in hundreds of potentially useful documents returned by the system. Our hypothesis is that interactive 3D graphics techniques can be used to help the user comprehend and filter such result sets. We describe some prototypes developed at NIST in pursuit of these goals and discuss associated design issues, such as icon appearance, layout within 3D space, and interaction mechanisms.

THREE (3) THINGS I LEARNED:

1.Visualization gives the user an immediate overview of the retrieval set.
2.The graphical display of keyword strengths makes it easy to understand at a glance the relative distribution of terms in a document.
3.Visualization maybe the solution in retrieval problem by helping the user find those documents which are most relevant more quickly than a traditional scrolled list.

IMPLICATIONS
As a searcher, we usually encountered difficulties in finding those documents which are relevant to what we are searching. Based on this article, visualization can be a solution for that retrieval problem. Example of those were although the order of the list makes it more likely that useful documents are at the top, the may be the “best” document from the user’s perspective may be towards the end. Visualization helps can be used to interactively filter result sets. Also, visualization helps users comprehend large quantities of data, and visual attributes can present abstract representations of data. In visualization, relationships among displayed entities become apparent. So, it only implies that visualization for document retrieval helps a lot in having a refined result in our searching.