summary:This paper presents an alternative interface for browsing in the Czech Digital Mathematics Library (DML-CZ) using our Visual Browser web browsing tool. Using dynamic visualization, we have created a tool for browsing the library graphically. Visualization can help users orient themselves in complex data and at the same time reveal sometimes unexpected relationships among units; it at least speeds up browsing. This work follows the metadata processing undertaken on DML-CZ and visualizes all reasonable and useful relationships among journals, issues, articles, authors, classification, keywords, references and similar articles. We converted metadata to RDF and use a Visual Browser Java Applet that runs in a web browser. We describe briefly the metadata nature, then server and client side of the visualization including data formats and conversions. There follows a description of the interaction between visual and textual interfaces

Nevěřilová, Zuzana

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Institute of Mathematics AS CR, v. v. i.

DML 2010Zuzana NevěřilováImplementing Dynamic Visualization as an Alternative Interface toa Digital Mathematics LibraryIn: Petr Sojka (ed.): Towards a Digital Mathematics Library. Paris, France, July 7-8th, 2010.Masaryk University Press, Brno, Czech Republic, 2010. pp. 63--68.Persistent URL: http://dml.cz/dmlcz/702574Terms of use:© Masaryk University, 2010Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic provides access todigitized documents strictly for personal use. Each copy of any part of this document mustcontain these Terms of use.This paper has been digitized, optimized for electronic delivery and stampedwith digital signature within the project DML-CZ: The Czech DigitalMathematics Library http://project.dml.czImplementing Dynamic Visualization asan Alternative Interface toa Digital Mathematics LibraryZuzana NevěřilováMasaryk University, Faculty of InformaticsBotanická 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republicxpopelk@fi.muni.czAbstract. This paper presents an alternative interface for browsing in theCzech Digital Mathematics Library (DML-CZ) using our Visual Browserweb browsing tool. Using dynamic visualization, we have created a toolfor browsing the library graphically. Visualization can help users orientthemselves in complex data and at the same time reveal sometimesunexpected relationships among units; it at least speeds up browsing.This work follows the metadata processing undertaken on DML-CZ andvisualizes all reasonable and useful relationships among journals, issues,articles, authors, classification, keywords, references and similar articles.We converted metadata to RDF and use a Visual Browser Java Appletthat runs in a web browser. We describe briefly the metadata nature, thenserver and client side of the visualization including data formats andconversions. There follows a description of the interaction between visualand textual interfaces.Key words: visualization, RDF, visual interface, Visual Browser, DML-CZ,EuDML1 IntroductionThis paper presents dynamic visual interface for browsing the Czech DigitalMathematics Library (DML-CZ) as an alternative to a textual listing. We areoffering the interface to the ongoing EuDML project1 [13]. The DML-CZ [1]currently contains more than 28,000 articles in 11 journals, 5 proceedings seriesand 28 monographs [6]. Users usually do not browse within such a vast amountof data, rather they search for titles or authors.On the search results page users can see the number of search results andthe list of articles. When clicking on an article, the information listed below isshown:– bibliographic information about the article (author, title, serial, year,Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) [7], . . . );– preview of the article and link to the PDF;– link to similar articles;– references with links to articles where possible.1 The European Digital Mathematics Library – http://www.eudml.eu/Petr Sojka (editor): DML 2010, Towards a Digital Mathematics Library, pp. 63–68.c© Masaryk University, 2010 ISBN 978-80-210-5242-064 Zuzana NevěřilováThe particular advantage of the DML-CZ interface is that it finds similararticles in search results. Three methods for calculating similarities areused [10] and the percentages are expressed graphically. This is so far theonly information that is visualized. Nevertheless according to [14] a goodvisualization helps accelerating the cognitive process, since the eyes can pickup details of the visualization and keep a holistic overview at the same time.Visualization is most suitable for complex and relatively sparse data and this isprecisely the case of library data.Google has started to offer a graphical interface for search results in additionto the standard view: their so-called Google Wonder Wheel2 has both plain textand timelines. Information seekers who would tend to use it, are likely toappreciate it for not only Google searches.The structure of paper is as follows. In Section 2 we describe the server sideincluding data formats provided by the server. Section 3 briefly describes theVisual Browser and shows the interaction between the Visual Browser and thetextual listing on the web page. Section 4 contains both the conclusion and thefuture development that the dynamic visual interface may undergo.2 Server SideSince the amount of data in DML-CZ is very large, a client-server architectureis the most suitable. The server has to store the data, provide a method for itsretrieval and quickly return a small amount of the data requested.2.1 Data FormatsBecause the client side uses RDF [2], the server has also to provide this format.We had to convert the existing XML format of metadata to RDF. This conversionrequired the following steps:– selecting only the appropriate data for visualization (some information isomitted);– assigning IDs for articles, issues, journals and authors;– adding short titles for the visualization;– conversion of the lang attribute according to RFC 3066 sec. 2.3 [12];– adding information about similar articles;– adding MSC labels.2.2 RDF ServerJoseki RDF Server3 was used. It offers SPARQL [9] as a query language. Josekiwas selected because of the Jena Framework4 used in the client. Nevertheless,the server side can be substituted by any other RDF server if needed. The datais stored in a relational database.2 http://www.googlewonderwheel.com/3 http://joseki.sourceforge.net/4 http://jena.sourceforge.net/Implementing Dynamic Visualization . . . to a Digital Mathematics Library 653 Client SideOn the client side two interfaces are used: a traditional textual interface (alist of authors and articles) and the Visual Browser [8]. The latter is a toolfor the dynamic (animated) visualization of RDF graphs. It provides flexiblevisualization thanks to the two-layer architecture:– first layer—the data stored in RDF (whether in RDF/XML, N3 [3] orTurtle [5]);– second layer—perspective of view, an XML description of graphic representa-tion of nodes and edges of the graph.The visualization of different types of data is described below.The Visual Browser exists either as a standalone Java application or as a Javaapplet. The applet can communicate with textual parts of the search resultspage. The interaction Java Applet—web page was made through AJAX5 plusJavaScript to communicate with the applet.Submitting the search field or browsing data in one of the interfaces resultsin a SPARQL query. The server evaluates the query and returns an RDF graph.The XSLT [4] conversion is made and the result is returned as a list of authorsand titles. The communication between the applet and the web page is bi-directional: clicking on a name or title in the list renders a set of nodes andedges in the visual interface, a set of nodes and edges can be displayed as a listof authors and articles.We expect users to type (part of) a name or title in the search box. Thenusers can browse either the more familiar textual interface (as they are usedto), or the visual one. Conversely, when viewing a particular subgraph in theVisual Browser, users can click to have it appear it in the textual interface asseen in Figure 1.Fig. 1. Visual and textual interfaces to search results within DML-CZ. It allowsusers to choose how they browse the results. For this purpose, it is necessarythat the interfaces are able to communicate.5 Asynchonous JavaScript And XML66 Zuzana Nevěřilová3.1 Visualizing MetadataIn this visualization, nodes represent units such as authors, articles, issues,journals, and keywords and MSC as well. Different classes of units arerepresented by different colours and shapes. Mapping from logical entitiesto their visual attributes is fully configurable in Visual Browser.Edges represent authors and their articles, articles in issues, issues injournals, as well as links between similar articles. Some of these relationsare structural (e.g. articles in issues), some are semantic (e.g. classification ofarticles), some have both aspects (authors of articles). We have to evaluateusers’ behaviour to decide what types of relations are useful for browsing.Even though we expect semantic relations to be more important than thestructural ones, we nevertheless display both types of relations. Similarly to thevisualization of nodes, the appearance of the edge (its colour, shape and length)distinguishes different classes of edges.Pointing cursor on a node opens a small po-up window with a short text.This can be helpful when displaying titles or even abstracts as seen in Figure 2.Fig. 2. Visualization of texts: pointing the cursor on a node, more informationpop-up in a small window3.2 Visualizing SimilaritiesThe current interface for DML-CZ provides information about semanticallysimilar articles. Similarities have been pre-calculated [11] using three differentmethods [10]. Similar articles are connected with edges of different lengths; theshorter the edge, the more similar two articles are (see Figure 3 on the nextpage).Implementing Dynamic Visualization . . . to a Digital Mathematics Library 67Fig. 3. Visualization of similarities: the length of the edge is also a bearer ofmeaning; with edge labels displayed, one can also see similarities expressed bynumbers3.3 Visualizing ReferencesScientific articles usually cite other sources. These citations (references) arerelated to a topic mentioned in that article and therefore can help users whohave already read the article and are looking for further reading. The requiredstate will be that users can browse references to articles regardless of therepository these articles come from. Achieving a high coverage of at leastarticles’ metadata is one of the major goals of the EuDML project.4 Conclusion and Future WorkWe have presented an alternative to the current DML-CZ interface. Visualinterfaces are more attractive and can help orientation in complex data such aslibrary records. So far we do experiment with this, targeting at possibility toinclude it in the official DML-CZ site and offering it to the EuDML project.Future work comprises monitoring users’ preferences on interfaces andtheir possible feedback. It will probably take some time before users getaccustomed to utilize the visual interface, since it is far from the traditionalway of browsing. But we hope that users will appreciate the holistic overviewof complex information.Our immediate plans include working on the design of the search resultinterfaces. For this, users’ feedback will be necessary. We also have to test theRDF Server on the significant loads that are expected within DML-CZ andEuDML. These conditions seem necessary for usability within any real-worldDML. Working prototype can be seen onhttp://dmlsearch.dml.cz/.68 Zuzana NevěřilováAcknowledgmentsThis research has been partially supported by the grant reg. no. 1ET200190513of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (DML-CZ), and by EU project# 250,503 in CIP-ICT-PSP.2009.2.4 (EuDML).References1. Bartošek, M., Lhoták, M., Rákosník, J., Sojka, P., Šárfy, M.: DML-CZ: The Objectivesand the First Steps. In: Borwein, J., Rocha, E.M., Rodrigues, J.F. (eds.) CMDE 2006:Communicating Mathematics in the Digital Era, pp. 69–79. A. K. Peters, MA, USA(2008)2. Beckett, D., McBride, B.: RDF/XML syntax specification (February 2004), http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/3. Berners-Lee, T.: Notation 3 (2008), http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation34. Clark, J.: XSL transformations (XSLT) (1999), http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt5. David Beckett, T.B.L.: Turtle – terse RDF triple language (2008), http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/6. DML: The Czech Digital Mathematics Library – news (2010), http://dml.cz/news,retrieved April 20, 20107. Ion, P., Eilbeck, C.: Mathematics Subject Classification 2010 (2010), http://msc2010.org/8. Nevěřilová, Z.: Visual Browser: A tool for visualising ontologies. In: Proceedings ofI-KNOW’05. pp. 453–461. Know-Center in coop. with Graz Uni, Joanneum Researchand Springer Pub. Co., Graz, Austria (2005)9. Prud’hommeaux, E., Seaborne, A.: SPARQL query language for RDF (2008),http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/10. Řehůřek, R., Sojka, P.: Automated Classification and Categorization of MathematicalKnowledge. In: Autexier, S., Campbell, J., Rubio, J., Sorge, V., Suzuki, M., Wiedijk,F. (eds.) Intelligent Computer Mathematics—Proceedings of 7th InternationalConference on Mathematical Knowledge Management MKM 2008. Lecture Notesin Computer Science LNCS/LNAI, vol. 5144, pp. 543–557. Springer-Verlag, Berlin,Heidelberg (Jul 2008)11. Řehůřek, R., Sojka, P.: Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora.In: Proceedings of LREC 2010 workshop New Challenges for NLP Frameworks.pp. 45–50. Valletta, Malta (2010), software available at http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/gensim12. RFC3066: Tags for the identification of languages (January 2001), http://potaroo.net/ietf/idref/rfc3066/13. Sylwestrzak, W., Borbinha, J., Bouche, T., Nowiński, A., Sojka, P.: EuDML—Towardsthe European Digital Mathematics Library. In: Sojka, P. (ed.) Proceedings of DML2010, pp. 11–26. Masaryk University Press, Paris, France (Jul 2010)14. Tufte, E.: Envisioning Information. Graphics Press (1990)

Implementing Dynamic Visualization as an Alternative Interface to a Digital Mathematics Library

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Implementing Dynamic Visualization as an Alternative Interface to a Digital Mathematics Library

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Institute of Mathematics AS CR, v. v. i.