Periscope A System for Adaptive 3D Visualization of Search Results

1. Periscope – A System for Adaptive 3D Visualization of Search Results By Wojciech Wiza, Krzysztof Walczak & Wojciech Cellary

2. Authors

3. Wojciech Wiza, Ph.D. Poznan University of Economics, Poland Department of Information Technology Research Areas Virtual Reality Computer 3D Graphics Information Visualization Internet & Intranet Systems Search Systems XML Applications

4. Krzysztof Walczak, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, Poznan University of Economics, Poland Department of Information Technology Research Areas Virtual Reality Multimedia Systems Interactive Television Internet and Intranet Systems Databases

5. Wojciech Cellary, Ph.D. Poznan University of Economics, Poland Head of Department of Information Technology Research Areas Internet Technologies Multimedia Electronic Business Information Society Database modeling of Virtual Reality

6. What is the problem under study? Presentation interface of the search results Lists of resources found with a short description

7. How else can we present the results? Graphical representation of data 2D map or a 3D scene

8. Related Work in 3D Visualization Visualization projects of Large Data at HCIL Visualization of Massive Newsfeed in 3D by Rossi and Varga NIRVE project at NIST VR-VIBE at University of Nottingham ViOS by Julian Lombardi Starlight System at PNNL

9. NIRVE (NIST Information Retrieval Engine)

10. “Visualization of Search Results: A Comparative Evaluation of Text, 2D, and 3D Interfaces” by the NIRVE team Study showed that “…the available features and the required tasks seemed to matter more than the dimensionality of the visualization” NIRVE (NIST Information Retrieval Engine)

11. VR-VIBE

12. ViOS (Visual Internet Operating System)

13. Problems in the earlier systems Only one interface environment Limited information capacity

14. AVE – Adaptive Visualization Environments Automatically selects an interface, from a collection of available interfaces, that best fits the search results Allows user to influence the selection Presents a global view by visualizing all the results returned by search engine Three types of interfaces depending on search result volume: holistic, analytic and hybrid interfaces

15. Periscope System Prototype system based on AVE Acts as an intermediary layer between a user and indexing search engines Based on X-VRML (Extensive Virtual Reality Modeling Language)

16. Periscope System

17. Periscope System Metamodels An X-VRML program used by Periscope system to select an appropriate Interface Model when a request for Interface Model change is received Uses static and dynamic routes Static routes are hardwired Dynamic routes chose an Interface Model depending upon algorithm in Metamodel, data from DB and parameters provided by the user

18. Interface Models: an abstract collection of interface models Composed of three parts: 3D Scene Model, Interaction Interface and 2D User Interface Periscope System

19. Periscope System Interface Model Selection Based on interface readability paradigm by Wiza et al. (2003) Facet F is a pair (§i, ci) §i is a visualization dimension ci represents visualization dimension capacity, maximum values §i can have in an interface model

20. Periscope System Aggregation tables created to determine which holistic interface is to be used Table created based on document attributes Each aggregation table is built on unique subset of the set of attributes of the documents

21. Periscope System Interface is selected based on best possible fit between aggregation table, interface model and mapping of attributes Each of the aggregation tables is matched against all Interface Models based on some rules using the readability properties F (§i, ci) & n.

22. Sample Interfaces Holistic interface Two visualization dimensions Each sphere represents language of documents Each slice represents distribution of documents within DNS domains

23. Analytic interface 7 visualization dimensions More details of each object Useful for detailed analysis of smaller data set

24. Hybrid Interface Holistic view of all documents Additional visualization dimension color provides details of the files

25. Conclusions Periscope Provides global view Provides novel user interface Provides multiple interactive interfaces Allows model switching Customized attribute mapping Supports comparative searches

26. Future Work Improvements in interface selection method Development of new interfaces

27. Usefulness of Periscope “Feedback from users that have used Periscope confirms that the idea of three-dimensional visualization of search results is accepted especially as a tool complementary to the traditional search engines” “A Method of Holistic 3D Visualization of Arbitrarily Large Datasets” (2005) by the same team

28. Usefulness of Periscope No study evaluating the system is presented Previous study of NIRVE showed contrasting results to the authors’ claims Value of Periscope remains unclear

29. There is a need of the global view of results in a search task Little justification, maybe more illustrative examples? Document properties like size and language useful in a holistic view of the search result Are they properties that users look for? Assumptions

30. Questions