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The amount of information available on the internet and within enterprises has reached an incredible dimension.Efficiently finding and understanding information and thereby saving resources remains one of the major challenges in our daily work. Powerful text analysis methods, a scalable faceted retrieval engine and a well-designed interactive user interface are required to address the problem. Besides providing means for drilling-down to the relevant piece of information, a part of the challenge arises from the need of analysing and visualising data to discover relationships and correlations, gain an overview of data distributions and unveil trends. Visual interfaces leverage the enormous bandwidth of the human visual system to support pattern discovery in large amounts of data. Our Knowminer search builds upon the well-known faceted search approach which is extended with interactive visualisations allowing users to analyse different aspects of the result set. Additionally, our system provides functionality for organising interesting search results into portfolios, and also supports social features for rating and boosting search results and for sharing and annotating portfolios.

The analysis of temporal relationships in large amounts of graph data has gained significance in recent years. In-formation providers such as journalists seek to bring order into their daily work when dealing with temporally dis-tributed events and the network of entities, such as persons, organisations or locations, which are related to these events. In this paper we introduce a time-oriented graph visualisation approach which maps temporal information to visual properties such as size, transparency and position and, combined with advanced graph navigation features, facilitates the identification and exploration of temporal relationships. To evaluate our visualisation, we compiled a dataset of ~120.000 news articles from international press agencies including Reuters, CNN, Spiegel and Aljazeera. Results from an early pilot study show the potentials of our visualisation approach and its usefulness for analysing temporal relationships in large data sets.

Graphs are widely used to represent relationshipsbetween entities. Indeed, their simplicity in depicting connect-edness backed by a mathematical formalism, make graphs anideal metaphor to convey relatedness between entities irrespec-tive of the domain. However, graphs pose several challenges forvisual analysis. A large number of entities or a densely con-nected set quickly render the graph unreadable due to clutter.Typed relationships leading to multigraphs cannot clearly berepresented in hierarchical layout or edge bundling, commonclutter reduction techniques. We propose a novel approach tovisual analysis of complex graphs based on two metaphors:semantic blossom and selective expansion. Instead of showingthe whole graph, we display only a small representative subsetof nodes, each with a compressed summary of relations in asemantic blossom. Users apply selective expansion to traversethe graph and discover the subset of interest. A preliminaryevaluation showed that our approach is intuitive and usefulfor graph exploration and provided insightful ideas for futureimprovements.