Semantic Exploration of Text Documents with Multi-Faceted Metadata Employing Word Embeddings: The Patent Landscaping Use Case

Die Menge der Veröentlichungen, die den wissenschaftlichen Fortschritt dokumentieren, wächst kontinuierlich. Dies erfordert die Entwicklung der technologischen Hilfsmittel für eine eziente Analyse dieser Werke. Solche Dokumente kennzeichnen sich nicht nur durch ihren textuellen Inhalt, sondern auch durch eine Menge von Metadaten-Attributen verschiedenster Art, unter anderem Beziehungen zwischen den Dokumenten. Diese Komplexität macht die Entwicklung eines Visualisierungsansatzes, der eine Untersuchung der schriftlichen Werke unterstützt, zu einer notwendigen und anspruchsvollen Aufgabe. Patente sind beispielhaft für das beschriebene Problem, weil sie in großen Mengen von Firmen untersucht werden, die sich Wettbewerbsvorteile verschaffen oder eigene Forschung und Entwicklung steuern wollen. Vorgeschlagen wird ein Ansatz für eine explorative Visualisierung, der auf Metadaten und semantischen Embeddings von Patentinhalten basiert ist. Wortembeddings aus einem vortrainierten Word2vec-Modell werden genutzt, um Ähnlichkeiten zwischen Dokumenten zu bestimmen. Darüber hinaus helfen hierarchische Clusteringmethoden dabei, mehrere semantische Detaillierungsgrade durch extrahierte relevante Stichworte anzubieten. Derzeit dürfte der vorliegende Visualisierungsansatz der erste sein, der semantische Embeddings mit einem hierarchischen Clustering verbindet und dabei diverse Interaktionstypen basierend auf Metadaten-Attributen unterstützt. Der vorgestellte Ansatz nimmt Nutzerinteraktionstechniken wie Brushing and Linking, Focus plus Kontext, Details-on-Demand und Semantic Zoom in Anspruch. Dadurch wird ermöglicht, Zusammenhänge zu entdecken, die aus dem Zusammenspiel von 1) Verteilungen der Metadatenwerten und 2) Positionen im semantischen Raum entstehen. Das Visualisierungskonzept wurde durch Benutzerinterviews geprägt und durch eine Think-Aloud-Studie mit Patentenexperten evaluiert. Während der Evaluation wurde der vorgestellte Ansatz mit einem Baseline-Ansatz verglichen, der auf TF-IDF-Vektoren basiert. Die Benutzbarkeitsstudie ergab, dass die Visualisierungsmetaphern und die Interaktionstechniken angemessen gewählt wurden. Darüber hinaus zeigte sie, dass die Benutzerschnittstelle eine deutlich größere Rolle bei den Eindrücken der Probanden gespielt hat als die Art und Weise, wie die Patente platziert und geclustert waren. Tatsächlich haben beide Ansätze sehr ähnliche extrahierte Clusterstichworte ergeben. Dennoch wurden bei dem semantischen Ansatz die Cluster intuitiver platziert und deutlicher abgetrennt. Das vorgeschlagene Visualisierungslayout sowie die Interaktionstechniken und semantischen Methoden können auch auf andere Arten von schriftlichen Werken erweitert werden, z. B. auf wissenschaftliche Publikationen. Andere Embeddingmethoden wie Paragraph2vec [61] oder BERT [32] können zudem verwendet werden, um kontextuelle Abhängigkeiten im Text über die Wortebene hinaus auszunutzen

Structuring visual exploratory analysis of skill demand

The analysis of increasingly large and diverse data for meaningful interpretation and question answering is handicapped by human cognitive limitations. Consequently, semi-automatic abstraction of complex data within structured information spaces becomes increasingly important, if its knowledge content is to support intuitive, exploratory discovery. Exploration of skill demand is an area where regularly updated, multi-dimensional data may be exploited to assess capability within the workforce to manage the demands of the modern, technology- and data-driven economy. The knowledge derived may be employed by skilled practitioners in defining career pathways, to identify where, when and how to update their skillsets in line with advancing technology and changing work demands. This same knowledge may also be used to identify the combination of skills essential in recruiting for new roles. To address the challenges inherent in exploring the complex, heterogeneous, dynamic data that feeds into such applications, we investigate the use of an ontology to guide structuring of the information space, to allow individuals and institutions to interactively explore and interpret the dynamic skill demand landscape for their specific needs. As a test case we consider the relatively new and highly dynamic field of Data Science, where insightful, exploratory data analysis and knowledge discovery are critical. We employ context-driven and task-centred scenarios to explore our research questions and guide iterative design, development and formative evaluation of our ontology-driven, visual exploratory discovery and analysis approach, to measure where it adds value to users’ analytical activity. Our findings reinforce the potential in our approach, and point us to future paths to build on

A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application

Design Patterns for Situated Visualization in Augmented Reality

Situated visualization has become an increasingly popular research area in the visualization community, fueled by advancements in augmented reality (AR) technology and immersive analytics. Visualizing data in spatial proximity to their physical referents affords new design opportunities and considerations not present in traditional visualization, which researchers are now beginning to explore. However, the AR research community has an extensive history of designing graphics that are displayed in highly physical contexts. In this work, we leverage the richness of AR research and apply it to situated visualization. We derive design patterns which summarize common approaches of visualizing data in situ. The design patterns are based on a survey of 293 papers published in the AR and visualization communities, as well as our own expertise. We discuss design dimensions that help to describe both our patterns and previous work in the literature. This discussion is accompanied by several guidelines which explain how to apply the patterns given the constraints imposed by the real world. We conclude by discussing future research directions that will help establish a complete understanding of the design of situated visualization, including the role of interactivity, tasks, and workflows.Comment: To appear in IEEE VIS 202

Contributions to the cornerstones of interaction in visualization: strengthening the interaction of visualization

Visualization has become an accepted means for data exploration and analysis. Although interaction is an important component of visualization approaches, current visualization research pays less attention to interaction than to aspects of the graphical representation. Therefore, the goal of this work is to strengthen the interaction side of visualization. To this end, we establish a unified view on interaction in visualization. This unified view covers four cornerstones: the data, the tasks, the technology, and the human.Visualisierung hat sich zu einem unverzichtbaren Werkzeug für die Exploration und Analyse von Daten entwickelt. Obwohl Interaktion ein wichtiger Bestandteil solcher Werkzeuge ist, wird der Interaktion in der aktuellen Visualisierungsforschung weniger Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet als Aspekten der graphischen Repräsentation. Daher ist es das Ziel dieser Arbeit, die Interaktion im Bereich der Visualisierung zu stärken. Hierzu wird eine einheitliche Sicht auf Interaktion in der Visualisierung entwickelt

Multi-View Ontology Explorer (MOE): Interactive Visual Exploration of Ontologies

An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. This specification consists of a common vocabulary and information structure of a domain. Ontologies have applications in many fields to semantically link information in a standardized manner. In these fields, it is often crucial for both expert and non-expert users to quickly grasp the contents of an ontology; and to achieve this, many ontology tools implement visualization components. There are many past works on ontology visualization, and most of these tools are adapted from tree and graph based visualization techniques (e.g. treemaps, node-link graphs, and 3D interfaces). However, due to the enormous size of ontologies, these existing tools have their own shortcomings when dealing information overload, usually resulting in clutter and occlusion on the screen. In this thesis, we propose a set of novel visualizations and interactions to visualize very large ontologies. We design 5 dynamically linked visualizations that focus on a different level of abstraction individually. These different levels of abstraction start from a high-level overview down to a low-level entity. In addition, these visualizations collectively visualize landmarks, routes, and survey knowledge to support the formation of mental models. Search and save features are implemented to support on-demand and guided exploration. Finally, we implement our design as a web application

Line Harp: Importance-Driven Sonification for Dense Line Charts

Masteroppgave i informatikkINF399MAMN-PROGMAMN-IN

DesignSense: A Visual Analytics Interface for Navigating Generated Design Spaces

Generative Design (GD) produces many design alternatives and promises novel and performant solutions to architectural design problems. The success of GD rests on the ability to navigate the generated alternatives in a way that is unhindered by their number and in a manner that reflects design judgment, with its quantitative and qualitative dimensions. I address this challenge by critically analyzing the literature on design space navigation (DSN) tools through a set of iteratively developed lenses. The lenses are informed by domain experts\u27 feedback and behavioural studies on design navigation under choice-overload conditions. The lessons from the analysis shaped DesignSense, which is a DSN tool that relies on visual analytics techniques for selecting, inspecting, clustering and grouping alternatives. Furthermore, I present case studies of navigating realistic GD datasets from architecture and game design. Finally, I conduct a formative focus group evaluation with design professionals that shows the tool\u27s potential and highlights future directions

Visual analytics: The role of design and art in the emerging field of big data

Driven by the increasing complexity of data sets the need for sophisticated analytics algorithms coupled with visualization of both data and information is growing exponentially in every discipline and industry. Artists, designers and visual thinkers have an important role to play in the presentation and interpretation of data. The Visual Analytics Lab (VAL) at OCAD University is a preeminent research lab for innovation and training in information and scientific visualization and visual analytics. As well as its perspective on the field, two brief case studies are provided, one for health care and the second for media navigation and analysi