Rauch Manuela, Klieber Hans-Werner, Wozelka Ralph, Singh Santokh, Sabol Vedran
2015
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.
Rauch Manuela, Wozelka Ralph, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Sabol Vedran
2014
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.