Visualizing and Interacting with Concept Hierarchies

Concept Hierarchies and Formal Concept Analysis are theoretically well grounded and largely experimented methods. They rely on line diagrams called Galois lattices for visualizing and analysing object-attribute sets. Galois lattices are visually seducing and conceptually rich for experts. However they present important drawbacks due to their concept oriented overall structure: analysing what they show is difficult for non experts, navigation is cumbersome, interaction is poor, and scalability is a deep bottleneck for visual interpretation even for experts. In this paper we introduce semantic probes as a means to overcome many of these problems and extend usability and application possibilities of traditional FCA visualization methods. Semantic probes are visual user centred objects which extract and organize reduced Galois sub-hierarchies. They are simpler, clearer, and they provide a better navigation support through a rich set of interaction possibilities. Since probe driven sub-hierarchies are limited to users focus, scalability is under control and interpretation is facilitated. After some successful experiments, several applications are being developed with the remaining problem of finding a compromise between simplicity and conceptual expressivity

Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

P ORTOLAN: a Model-Driven Cartography Framework

Processing large amounts of data to extract useful information is an essential task within companies. To help in this task, visualization techniques have been commonly used due to their capacity to present data in synthesized views, easier to understand and manage. However, achieving the right visualization display for a data set is a complex cartography process that involves several transformation steps to adapt the (domain) data to the (visualization) data format expected by visualization tools. To maximize the benefits of visualization we propose Portolan, a generic model-driven cartography framework that facilitates the discovery of the data to visualize, the specification of view definitions for that data and the transformations to bridge the gap with the visualization tools. Our approach has been implemented on top of the Eclipse EMF modeling framework and validated on three different use cases

The other side of the social web: A taxonomy for social information access

The power of the modern Web, which is frequently called the Social Web or Web 2.0, is frequently traced to the power of users as contributors of various kinds of contents through Wikis, blogs, and resource sharing sites. However, the community power impacts not only the production of Web content, but also the access to all kinds of Web content. A number of research groups worldwide explore what we call social information access techniques that help users get to the right information using "collective wisdom" distilled from actions of those who worked with this information earlier. This invited talk offers a brief introduction into this important research stream and reviews recent works on social information access performed at the University of Pittsburgh's PAWS Lab lead by the author. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)

Video Data Visualization System: Semantic Classification And Personalization

We present in this paper an intelligent video data visualization tool, based on semantic classification, for retrieving and exploring a large scale corpus of videos. Our work is based on semantic classification resulting from semantic analysis of video. The obtained classes will be projected in the visualization space. The graph is represented by nodes and edges, the nodes are the keyframes of video documents and the edges are the relation between documents and the classes of documents. Finally, we construct the user's profile, based on the interaction with the system, to render the system more adequate to its references.Comment: graphic

Multi-touch 3D Exploratory Analysis of Ocean Flow Models

Modern ocean flow simulations are generating increasingly complex, multi-layer 3D ocean flow models. However, most researchers are still using traditional 2D visualizations to visualize these models one slice at a time. Properly designed 3D visualization tools can be highly effective for revealing the complex, dynamic flow patterns and structures present in these models. However, the transition from visualizing ocean flow patterns in 2D to 3D presents many challenges, including occlusion and depth ambiguity. Further complications arise from the interaction methods required to navigate, explore, and interact with these 3D datasets. We present a system that employs a combination of stereoscopic rendering, to best reveal and illustrate 3D structures and patterns, and multi-touch interaction, to allow for natural and efficient navigation and manipulation within the 3D environment. Exploratory visual analysis is facilitated through the use of a highly-interactive toolset which leverages a smart particle system. Multi-touch gestures allow users to quickly position dye emitting tools within the 3D model. Finally, we illustrate the potential applications of our system through examples of real world significance