A visual analysis of the usage efficiency of library books

The monographic collections in academic libraries have undergone a period of tremendous growth in volume, in subject diversity, and in formats during the recent several decades. Readers may find it difficult to prioritize which book(s) should be borrowed for a specific purpose. The log data of book loan record may serve as a visible indicator for the more sought-after books by the readers. This paper describes our experimental efforts in works in a university library setting. The visual analysis is thought to provide an effective way to extract the book usage information, which may yield new insights into a host of other related technical as well as user behavior issues. Initial experiment has demonstrated that the proposed approach as articulated in this article can actually benefit end-users as well as library collection development personnel in their endeavor of book selections with effective measure.</p

Building Social Digital Libraries

The accelerating rate of scientific and technical discovery, typified by the ever-shortening time period for the doubling of information – currently estimated at 18 months – causes new topics to emerge at an increasing rate. Large amounts of human knowledge are available online – not only in the form of texts and images, but also as audio files, movies, software demos, etc

Collaborative Visual Interface for Knowledge Management ---The Design and the Influence Analysis

[[abstract]]既有的查詢介面，常以單一的使用者為設計的核心，因此使用者常需單獨面對查詢資訊的過程。本研究建議設計新的合作式視覺介面，讓使用者在查詢資訊的過程中，可以輕易地找到有類似興趣的人，並透過彼此的溝通與討論，提升資訊搜尋的速度與品質。為了瞭解所設計的介面對決策的影響，我們也在研究中提出模式與假設，希望利用實驗的方式，深入分析不同的介面設計所帶來的影響。我們的研究成果，將提供系統設計及資訊搜尋者，作為設計查詢介面的參考以及分析介面設計影響的基礎。[[abstract]]Existing efforts on query interface design concentrate on single user and result in lonely knowledge seeking process. Therefore, in this research, we suggest to design a collaborative visual interface in which human users can take advantages of the behavior of the like-mined people via interaction, and thereby exploring complex information space collaboratively. In order to understand the influence of the designed interface on decision making, in this research, we also propose a model to test the interactive querying environment. The results of this research will provide system designers with heuristics of constructing querying interfaces and inform knowledge seeks how querying interfaces influence the performance of decision making

VisIRR: Interactive Visual Information Retrieval and Recommendation for Large-scale Document Data

Research areas: Machine learning, Data mining, Information visualization, Visual analytics, Text visualization.We present a visual analytics system called VisIRR, which is an interactive visual information retrieval and recommendation system for document discovery. VisIRR effectively combines both paradigms of passive pull through a query processes for retrieval and active push that recommends the items of potential interest based on the user preferences. Equipped with efficient dynamic query interfaces for a large corpus of document data, VisIRR visualizes the retrieved documents in a scatter plot form with their overall topic clusters. At the same time, based on interactive personalized preference feedback on documents, VisIRR provides recommended documents reaching out to the entire corpus beyond the retrieved sets. Such recommended documents are represented in the same scatter space of the retrieved documents so that users can perform integrated analyses of both retrieved and recommended documents seamlessly. We describe the state-of-the-art computational methods that make these integrated and informative representations as well as real time interaction possible. We illustrate the way the system works by using detailed usage scenarios. In addition, we present a preliminary user study that evaluates the effectiveness of the system