Current Applications

This section contains information about information visualizers and existing applications of Information Visualization techniques to the World-Wide Web.

Information Visualizers

This section discusses the following applications that either use Information Visualization techniques or function as test beds for exploring new Information Visualization techniques.

The Information Visualizer (Xerox PARC)
The Information Visualization Exploration Environment (Chalmers U.)
Film Finder and Home Finder (U. Maryland)
DeckView

Information Visualizer

[CARD91] 3 components:

3D Rooms
Cognitive Co-Processor (animation-oriented UI architecture)
Information Visualizations

perceptual processing time constant: 100 ms

Visualizations:

Cone Tree for hierarchical data
Perspective Wall for linearly-structured data
Data Sculpture / Data Map for 3D data in space
Building

Information Visualization Exploration Environment (IVEE)

[AHLB95] Multiple visualizations of the same data, at the same time. Retrieve details on demand by clicking on visualization objects. Uses:

film finder
zoom bars
starfield display
alphaslider
range slider
rotation slider
home finder
periodic table
geographic visualizations
dynamic queries

Film Finder & Home Finder

[JOG] Uses starfield display and zoom bar.

DeckView

[GINS96] Uses a thumbnail view of postscript pages.

advantages:

position of fully visible thumbnail locates the current page in the document
drag through thumbnails to scan the pages
temporary and permanent bookmarks
annotation features places a postscript comment directly in the file;
- doesn't screw up the PS document;
- can share the marked-up document
- all information is in a single file

Existing Web Applications

There have already been many attempts to apply these visualization techniques to accessing the WWW. Some of these applications include the following:

Zooming Web Browser
Narcissus Clustering System
Harmony Internet Browser
MITRE enhancements to NCSA Mosaic
Navigational View Builder
Tabular Visualization (should perhaps be under basic techniques?)
No Information Yet!
- Personal infospace
- Web Book
- Web Forager

Zooming Web Browser

[BEDE96]

multiple pages and the links between them are depicted on a large zoomable information surface
pages are scaled so that the page in focus is clearly readable with connected pages shown at smaller scales to provide context
layout changes are animated
pad++ allows www pages to remain visible at varying scales while they are not specifically being visited, so the viewer may examine many pages at once.

Narcissus

[HEND95] automatic clustering of data in 3D physically-based: Ð all objects repel each other Ð active relationships between objects cause attractive forces can be used to generate displays for xmosaic

Harmony Internet Browser

[ANDR95] hand-crafted vs. automatically-generated presentations

2D structure maps:

outline of browsing history
local map - the same information in a 2D graph

3D features

information landscape
fly over

MITRE enhancements to NCSA Mosaic

[GERS95a] (includes 2D view of word correlations)

Another problem for Internet surfers is that often they do not know where they "are" in information space and cannot remember how they got there. This is sometimes referred to as being "lost in cyberspace."...One remedy is to provide users with a view of the information space available to them. The user can "jump" from one document to another by clicking the mouse button without having to backtrack resource by resource, or in Web parlance, page by page. [GERS95b]

allows the user to view the hyperspace depicted as a visual "tree" structure
users can jump from one document to another by pointing and clicking without having to go back
allows users to view the names of documents and how they are linked without actually opening and reading each document
allows users to save the documents in a personal space
allows the user to create a new custom hyperlink structure to save and share

new tool for word correlation

Navigational View Builder

which uses two different techniques:

Filtering
Hierarchization

[MUKH95a] also 95b

can use multiple views of the network
landmarks should be identifiable
uses color, size, and shape to distinguish nodes
let the user decide the mapping between the data attributes and the visual properties (don't hard-code it!)
two aspects of color: hue vs saturation
filtering: also cluster-based vs. structure-based

Tabular Visualization

[MUKH96] (3D blocks in a 2D space)

Web Search Services

In addition to these applications, a there are a variety of new WWW search services that explore multiple search paths in parallel and collate the results. This has the effect of performing some of the filtering that is part of the Information Visualization "bag of tricks." These services include, but are not limited to:

MetaCrawler

[SELB96]

posts the query to multiple search services in parallel
collates the returned references
load references to verify their existence

This page maintained by Mark Brautigam (PDA version)
Last updated 1 March 1997