Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

  
1. InfoCrystal

retrieval results!InfoCrystal InfoCrystal

The InfoCrystal shows how many documents contain each subset of query terms [#!spoerri93!#]. This relieves the user from the need to specify Boolean ANDs and ORs in their query, while still showing which combinations of terms actually appear in documents that were ordered by a statistical ranking (although beyond four terms the interface becomes difficult to understand). The InfoCrystal allows visualization of all possible relations among N user-specified `concepts' (or Boolean keywords). The InfoCrystal displays, in a clever extension of the Venn diagram paradigm, the number of documents retrieved that have each possible subset of the N concepts. Figure shows a sketch of what the InfoCrystal might display as the result of a query against four keywords or Boolean phrases, labeled A, B, C, and D. The diamond in the center indicates that one document was discovered that contains all four keywords. The triangle marked with `12' indicates that 12 documents were found containing attributes A, B, and D, and so on.

The InfoCrystal does not show proximity among the terms within the documents, nor their relative frequency. So a document that contains dozens of hits on `volcano' and `lava' and one hit on `Mars' will be grouped with documents that contain mainly hits on `Mars' but just one mention each of `volcano' and `lava.'