UC IRVINE - ICS 125 PROJECT IN SYSTEM DESIGNPROJECT DESCRIPTION |
Visualizing and Exploring Document Spaces * Offered by the Information Access & Management group of the ICS department at UC Irvine * Customer contact: Dave Goggin (daveg@ics.uci.edu) David Goggin www.ics.uci.edu/~daveg Yun Lan www.ics.uci.edu/~ylan BACKGROUND As technology and the Internet continue to bring ever-increasing amounts of information into the hands of the people, the tools that leverage human information-processing (particularly spatial visual perception) capabilities for understanding the structure of this information resource have not been sufficiently developed. Most Internet search engines present results textually, either in categorical form, or as a long list of abstracted texts. Neither of these formats show visually the space of documents, nor do they show the conformation of the document space by categories in a way that invites category exploration. Likewise, conventional library search tools (e.g. ANTPAC, INSPEC) do not present a graphic interface to allow exploration of the collection, even when it has been indexed by human librarians into subject categories. Studies have shown that even when document collections are indexed by keywords, users typically do not use them in their exploration of the document collections. We hypothesize that this is mainly due to the lack of graphic support for such information foraging. Our system seeks to present a visual and explorable diagram of the many-to-many relationship between keywords and documents, as well as a graphic display of that part of the category hierarchy relevent to the document collection, as well as supporting interactive document query and retrieval. Begun in Summer '99, this document space visualization project has become an important research project for Dr. Wanda Pratt's group. Our project is wildly interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from software engineering, theory of algorithms, cognitive science, and the fine arts. BENEFITS TO STUDENT TEAM MEMBERS We expect we will learn a lot from one another! In particular, you will have the chance to use some of the current generation of client-server tools for building web applications, as well as become skillful with Java and its associated libraries, tools, and graphics packages. We'll probably also be learning some cognitive science to understand how information presented graphically is understood by users. In addition, we will need to do some user-centered evaluation. As an experienced software engineer, I will be able to teach you some of the theory and practice of object-oriented design and analysis, in particular, how to differentiate between a "good" and "bad" design. PROJECT OUTLINE Mr. Goggin and Ms. Lan are currently putting together a prototype graphic depiction of the many-to-many relation between documents and keywords using multidimensional scaling (MDS). We expect to demonstrate this prototype at the Jan. 28th ICS Research Symposium in addition to the present tree-based category graphic. There are essentially two parts of the project in which our ICS125 team members will be involved: 1. Finishing the graphical tools for displaying a document space visualization The present reused code for displaying the tree-based category graphic has very low capability because of a bug. We need to either debug the code (by ourselves or in collaboration with the original developer) or redesign/reimplement it. Add zooming-in capability to the tree-based and MDS graphics. Do preliminary user testing and evaluation 2. Extending the tool to allow graphical browsing and searching Designing efficient data structures and algorithms to support rapid updating of displayed graphics Designing and exploring alternative graphical representations Interfacing with other research projects (other graduate students' and Dr. Pratt's) to allow true real-time online searching through a web front end. User testing and evaluation of the system We expect to have our first team meetings soon. But it is not likely that there will be much work to be done before Jan. 28th.
ICS125 WQ00 Project Opportunities
ICS125 WQ00
David F. Redmiles Home Page
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine CA 92717-3425