Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

  
7. Tables

retrieval results!tables tables in user interfaces retrieval results!Envision Envision

Tabular display is another approach for showing relationships among retrieval documents. The Envision system  [#!fox93!#] allows the user to organize results according to metadata such as author or date along the X and Y-axes, and uses graphics to show values for attributes associated with retrieved documents within each cell (see Figure ). Color, shape, and size of an iconic representation of a document are used to show the computed relevance, the type of document, or other attributes. Clicking on an icon brings up more information about the document in another window. Like the WebCutter system , this view provides few cues about how the documents are related to one another in terms of their content or meaning. The SenseMaker system  also allows users to group documents into different views via a table-like display [#!baldonado97!#], including a Scatter/Gather [#!cutting92!#] style view. Although tables are appealing, they cannot show the intersections of many different attributes; rather they are better for pairwise comparisons. Another problem with tables for display of textual information is that very little information can be fitted on a screen at a time, making comparisons difficult.

  

Figure: The Envision tabular display for graphically organizing retrieved documents [#!FOX98!#].

visualization!Table Lens retrieval results!Table Lens Table Lens

The Table Lens  [#!rao94b!#] is an innovative interface for viewing and interactively reorganizing very large tables of information (see Figure 10.24). It uses focus-plus-context to fit hundreds of rows of information in a space occupied by at most two dozen rows in standard spreadsheets. And because it allows for rapid reorganization via sorting of columns, users can quickly switch from a view focused around one kind of metadata to another. For example, first sorting documents by rank and then by author name can show the relative ranks of different articles by the same author. A re-sort by date can show patterns in relevance scores with respect to date of publication. This rapid re-sorting capability helps circumvent the problems associated with the fact that tables cannot show many simultaneous intersections.

  

Figure: The TableLens visualization [#!rao94b!#].

visualization!Perspective Wall retrieval results!Perspective Wall Perspective Wall

Another variation on the table theme is that seen in the Perspective Wall  [#!mackinlay91!#] in which a focus-plus-context display is used to center information currently of interest in the middle of the display, compressing less important information into the periphery on the sides of the wall. The idea is to show in detail the currently most important information while at the same time retaining the context of the rest of the information. For example, if viewing documents in chronological order, the user can easily tell if they are currently looking at documents in the beginning, middle, or end of the time range.

These interfaces have not been applied to information access tasks. The problem with such displays when applied to text is that they require an attribute that can be shown according to an underlying order, such as date. Unfortunately, information useful for organizing text content, such as topic labels, does not have an inherent meaningful order. Alphabetical order is useful for looking up individual items, but not for seeing patterns across items according to adjacency, as in the case for ordered data types like dates and size. retrieval results|) context, interfaces for showing|)