INFORMATION VISUALIZATION

Introduction:
The primary focus on Information Retrieval Systems has been in the areas of
indexing, searching and clustering versus information display. This has been due to
the inability of technology to provide the technical platforms needed for
sophisticated display, academic's focusing on tile more interesting algorithmic
based search aspects of information retrieval, and the multi-disciplinary nature of
the human-computer interface (HCI).
The beginnings of the theory of visualization began over 2400 years ago.
The philosopher Plato discerned that we perceive objects through the senses, using
the mind. Our perception of the real world is a translation from physical energy
from our environment into encoded neural signals. The mind is continually
interpreting and categorizing our perception of our surroundings. Use of a
computer is another source of input to the mind's processing functions. Information
visualization is a relatively new discipline growing out of the debates in the 1970s
on the way the brain processes and uses mental images. It required significant
advancements in technology and information retrieval techniques to become a
possibility.
Information visualization techniques have the potential to significantly
enhance the user's ability to minimize resources expended to locate needed
information. The way users interact with computers changed with the introduction
of user interfaces based upon Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointing devices
(WIMPs). In information retrieval, the process of getting to the relevant details
starts with filtering many items via a search process. The result of this process is
still a large number of potentially relevant items. There are many areas that
information visualization and presentation can help the user:
a. reduce the amount of time to understand the results of a search
b. yield information that comes from the relationships between items
c. perform simple actions that produce sophisticated information search

Cognition and Perception

As computers displays became ubiquitous, man-machine interfaces focused on treating
the display as an extension of paper with the focus on consistency of operations. The advent of
WIMP interfaces and simultaneous parallel tasks in the user work environment expanded the
complexity of the interface to manipulate the multiple tasks. The advancements in computer
technology, information sciences and understanding human information processing are providing
the basis for extending the human computer interface to improve the information flow, thus
reducing wasted user overhead in locating needed information. Although the major focus is on
enhanced visualization of information, other senses are also being looked at for future interfaces.
The audio sense has always been part of simple alerts in computers.
Background:
A significant portion of the brain is devoted to vision and supports the maximum
information transfer function from the environment to a human being. Until then perception was
considered a data collection task and thinking as a higher level function using die data. He
contended that visual perception includes the process of understanding the information,
providing an ongoing feedback mechanism between the perception and thinking. He further
expanded his views arguing that treating perception and thinking as separate functions trots the
mind as a serial automata.
Visualization is the transformation of information into a visual form which enables the
user to observe and understand the information. This concept can be extended where the visual
images provide a fundamentally different way to understand information that treats the visual
input not as discrete facts but as an understanding process.

Shifting the information processing load from slower cognitive processes to faster
perceptual systems significantly improves the information-carrying interfaces between humans
and computers. An understanding of the way the cognitive processes work provides insights for
the decisions on which of the presentations will maximize the information passing and
understanding.
Aspects of the Visualization Process:
One of the first-level cognitive processes is preattention, that is, taking the significant
visual information from the photoreceptors and forming primitives. In Figure 8.1 the visual
system detects the difference in orientations between the left and middle portion of the figure and
determines the logical border between them.

The preattentive process can detect the boundaries between orientation groups of the
same object. For example, a rotated square requires more effort to recognize it as a square. As we
migrate into characters, the problem of identification of the character is affected by rotating the
character in a direction not normally encountered. It is easier to detect the symmetry when the
axis is vertical. Figure 8.2 demonstrates these effects.

Another visual factor is the optical illusion that makes a light object on a dark
background to appear larger than if the item is dark and the background is light. Making use of
this factor suggests that a visual display of small objects should use bright colors. An even more
complex area is the use of colors. Colors have many attributes that can be modified such as hue,
saturation and lightness. Hue is the physiological attribute of color sensation. Saturation is the
degree to which a hue is different from a gray line with the same lightness, while lightness is the
sensation of the amount of white or black.
Another visual cue that can be used is spatial frequency. The human visual and cognitive
system tends towards order and builds an coherent visual image whenever possible. The multiple
spatial channel theory proposes that a complex image is constructed from the external inputs, not
received as a single image. The final image is constructed from multiple receptors that detect
changes in spatial frequency, orientation, contrast, and spatial phase. Spatial frequency is an
acuity measure relative to regular light-dark changes that are in the visual field or similar
channels. A cycle is one complete light-dark change.

Information Visualization Technologies

The theories associated with information visualization are being applied in commercial
and experimental systems to determine the best way to improve the user interface, facilitating the
localization of information. They have been applied to many different situations and
environments (e.g., weather forecasting to architectural design). The ones focused on
Information Retrieval Systems are investigating how best to display the results of searches,
structured data from DBMSs and the results of link analysis correlating data.
Structured databases are important to information retrieval because structured files are
the best implementation to hold certain citation and semantic data that describe documents. Link
analysis is also important because it provides aggregate-level information within an information
system. Rather than treating each item as independent, link analysis considers information
flowing between documents with value in the correlation between multiple documents.
One way of organizing information is hierarchical. A tree structure is useful in
representing information that ranges over time (e.g., genealogical lineage), constituents of a
larger unit (e.g., organization structures, mechanical device definitions) and aggregates from the
higher to lower level (e.g., hierarchical clustering of documents). A two-dimensional
representation becomes difficult for a user to understand as the hierarchy becomes large. The
Cone-Tree is a 3-Dimensional representation of data. Compared to other hierarchical
representations (e.g., node and link trees) the cone makes the maximum information available to
the user providing a perspective on size of each of the subtrees (Gershon-95a, Robertson-93).

An example of a Cone-Tree is shown in Figure 8.4. The squares at the leaf nodes in tree
are the actual documents. Higher level nodes can be considered centroids representing the
semantic of the child nodes. Where the database is large, the boxes may represent a cluster of
related items versus a single item. These clusters could be expanded to lower levels of the tree.
The perspective wall divides the information into three visual areas with the area being focused
on in the front and other areas out of focus to each side (see Figure 8.5). This allows the user to
keep all of the information in perspective while focusing on a perticular area.

Another technique used in display of hierarchical information is tree maps. This

technique makes maximum use of the display screen space by using rectangular boxes that are
recursively subdivided based upon parent-child relationships between the data. A particular
information work space focused on articles on computers may appear as shown in Figure 8.6.

The size of the boxes can represent the number of items on a particular topic. The
location of the boxes can indicate a relationship between the topics. In Figure 8.6, the CPU, OS,
Memory, and Network management articles are all related to a general category of computer
operating systems versus computer applications which are shown in the rest of the figure.