Towards a Task-based Guidance in Exploratory Visual Analytics

Exploring large datasets and identifying meaningful information is still an active topic in many application fields. Dealing with large datasets is currently not only a matter of simply collecting and structuring data for retrieval, but sometimes it also requires the provision of adequate means for guiding the user through the exploration process. Visualizations have shown to be an effective method in this context, the reason being that since they are grounded on visual cognition, people understand them and can naturally perform visual operations such as clustering, filtering and comparing quantities. However, systems which help us to create visualizations often require specific knowledge in data analysis, which ordinary users typically do not possess. To address this gap, we propose a system that guides the user in the data analysis process. To achieve this, the system observes current user behavior, tries to infer the task of the user and recommends the next analysis steps to help her to carry out the task

The Recommendation Dashboard: A System to Visualise and Organise Recommendations

Abstract Recommender systems are becoming common tools supporting automatic, context-based retrieval of resources. When the number of retrieved resources grows large visual tools are required that leverage the capacity of human vision to analyse large amounts of information. We introduce a Web-based visual tool for exploring and organising recommendations retrieved from multiple sources along dimensions relevant to cultural heritage and educational context. Our tool provides several views supporting filtering in the result set and integrates a bookmarking system for organising relevant resources into topic collections. Building upon these features we envision a system which derives user's interests from performed actions and uses this information to support the recommendation process. We also report on results of the performed usability evaluation and derive directions for further development

Incremental and Scalable Computation of Dynamic Topography Information Landscapes

Dynamic topography information landscapes are capable of visualizing longitudinal changes in large document repositories. Resembling tectonic processes in the natural world, dynamic rendering reflects both long-term trends and short-term fluctuations in such repositories. To visualize the rise and decay of topics, the mapping algorithm elevates and lowers related sets of concentric contour lines. Acknowledging the growing number of documents to be processed by state-of-the-art Web intelligence applications, we present a scalable, incremental approach for generating such landscapes. The processing pipeline includes a number of sequential tasks, from crawling, filtering and pre-processing Web content to projecting, labeling and rendering the aggregated information. Processing steps central to incremental processing are found in the projection stage which consists of document clustering, cluster force-directed placement, and fast document positioning. We introduce two different positioning methods and compare them in an incremental setting using two different quality measures. The evaluation is performed on a set of approximately 5000 documents taken from the environmental blog sample of the Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate), a Web content aggregator about climate change and related environmental issues that serves static versions of the information landscapes presented in this paper as part of a multiple coordinated view representation

Dynamic Topography Information Landscapes – An Incremental Approach to Visual Knowledge Discovery

Incrementally computed information landscapes are an effective means to visualize longitudinal changes in large document repositories. Resembling tectonic processes in the natural world, dynamic rendering reflects both long-term trends and short-term fluctuations in such repositories. To visualize the rise and decay of topics, the mapping algorithm elevates and lowers related sets of concentric contour lines. Addressing the growing number of documents to be processed by state-of-the-art knowledge discovery applications, we introduce an incremental, scalable approach for generating such landscapes. The processing pipeline includes a number of sequential tasks, from crawling, filtering and pre-processing Web content to projecting, labeling and rendering the aggregated information. Incremental processing steps are localized in the projection stage consisting of document clustering, cluster force-directed placement and fast document positioning. We evaluate the proposed framework by contrasting layout qualities of incremental versus non-incremental versions. Documents for the experiments stem from the blog sample of the Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate). Experimental results indicate that our incremental computation approach is capable of accurately generating dynamic information landscapes

MOVING: A User-Centric Platform for Online Literacy Training and Learning

Part of the Progress in IS book series (PROIS)In this paper, we present an overview of the MOVING platform, a user-driven approach that enables young researchers, decision makers, and public administrators to use machine learning and data mining tools to search, organize, and manage large-scale information sources on the web such as scientific publications, videos of research talks, and social media. In order to provide a concise overview of the platform, we focus on its front end, which is the MOVING web application. By presenting the main components of the web application, we illustrate what functionalities and capabilities the platform offer its end-users, rather than delving into the data analysis and machine learning technologies that make these functionalities possible