Information Explosion

1
Information Explosion

• Computers, internet and web give people access to
  an incredible amount of information
• How do we make sense of it?
• How do we harness this information in
  decision-making processes?

2
Three Approaches

• Software Agents
• Computational agent that carries out users
  request
• Data Mining
• Software that analyzes database and extracts
  interesting features
• Information Visualization
• Visual tools to help users better examine the
  data themselves

3
Information Visualization

• What is Information?
• Items, entities, things which do not have a
  direct physical correspondence
• Notion of abstractness of the entities is
  important too

4
Information Visualization

• Definition
• Taking items without a physical correspondence
  and mapping them to a 2-D or 3-D physical space.
• Giving information a visual representation that
  is useful for analysis and decision-making

5
Main Tasks

• Search
• Finding a specific piece of information
• How many games did the Braves win in 1995?
• What novels did Ian Fleming author?
• Browsing
• Look over or inspect something in a more casual
  manner, seek interesting information
• Learn about crystallography
• What has Jane been up to lately?

6
Aspects

• Key aspects of Information Visualization
• Domains
• Source/Structure
• Tasks

7
Domains

• Statistics
• Text/books
• Web
• Business data

8
Source/Structure

• Hierarchies
• Networks
• Text (structured, corpora)
• Tuples

9
Tasks

• Browsing
• Analysis
• Comparison-Difference
• Outliers, Extremes
• Patterns
• Assimilation
• Monitoring

10
IV Techniques

• Aggregation
• Accumulate individual elements into a larger unit
  to be presented as some whole
• Overview Detail
• Provide both global overview and detail zooming
  capabilities
• Focus Context
• Show details of one or more regions in a more
  global context

11
IV Techniques

• Drill-down
• Select individual item or smaller set of items
  from a display for a more detailed view/analysis
• Brushing
• Select or designate/specify value, then see
  pertinent items on the display

12
Issues

• Graphic design
• Extremely important in information visualization
• Should reveal data and relationships, not obscure
  them

13
Issues

• Scalability
• Real key
• Presentation of information becomes really
  interesting as the size of the data grows

14
Issues

• 2-D vs. 3-D
• Many researchers push 3-D techniques
• But 3-D can make comparisons hard
• Animation can help make 3-D work better
• 3-D claimed to convey more information, but
  thats not clear (or maybe it adds some other
  problems such as navigation)

15
Techniques

• Fisheye View (G. Furnas 86)
• Region of interest shown in detail
• As you move away from that, less detail is shown
• Often uses DOI (Degree of Interest) function that
  maps distance from the focus to some output
  presentation mode/level

16
Techniques

• Dynamic Query
• Updated display of query results in an animated,
  interactive fashion
• Promotes exploration

17
Techniques

• Themescape
• Multi-dimensional relation of concepts
  mapped/projected into a 2-D/3-D visualization
  that shows the relation of concepts

18
Techniques

• Treemap - Shneiderman Johnson
• Showing a hierarchy using a rectangular
  slice-and-dice technique

19
Videos

• Networks
• Graphical fisheye
• Tuples
• Film finder
• SAGE
• Timelines
• Large repositories
• Information Mural

• Text
• Tilebars
• Themescapes
• Data Mountain
• Hierarchies
• Hyperbolic trees
• Treemaps
• Info Visualizer