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

Novel Visualizations and Interactions for Social Networks Exploration

International audienceIn the last decade, the popularity of social networking applications has dramatically increased. Social networks are collection of persons or organizations connected by relations. Members of Facebook listed as friends or persons connected by family ties in genealogical trees are examples of social networks. Today's web surfers are often part of many online social networks: they communicate in groups or forums on topics of interests, exchange emails with their friends and colleagues, express their ideas on public blogs, share videos on YouTube, exchange and comment photos on Flickr, participate to the edition of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia or contribute to daily news by collaborating to Wikinews or Agoravox