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Introduction and Overview: Visualization, Retrieval, and Knowledge
Mark Rorvig and Lois F. Lunin This Perspectives issue is assembled to provide an historical background to
visualization in information retrieval. It is a review of the assumptions and technology configurations by which the current literature may be interpreted. The techniques of the authors of this issue differ, but all
treat their techniques as manuals of description flowing from a history of common mathematical and technical influences. All technologies have histories of development. The historical forces of visualization frame
the current efforts and comprise the field in which new problem dimensions are addressed. No field of scientific inquiry emerges without a background. This issue adds to the depth necessary for the study of
visualization by new students and new scholars. |
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The NASA Image Collection Visual Thesaurus
M. E. Rorvig, C. H. Turner, and J. Moncada The first visual interface to a collection was designed and implemented at the Johnson Space Center
of NASA in the years 1988-1992. In this interface, described in the article entitled, "The NASA Visual Thesaurus," the Rorvig et al assumed that the task of inferring images from terms and terms from
images would introduce invariance in image indexing. The system remained in use for two years, but eventually failed because no automatic method to assign terms to images could be discovered, and the manual cost
of such term assignment was too great to be supported. Rorvig et al attempted to use image descriptions clustered by cosine vector methods to identify a unique image for every thesaurus term. The candidate
images suggested by this method were often heartbreakingly close to the mark. But close was not good enough. These developments were described in detail by Seloff (1990). Although the Seloff article has been widely
cited, the initial article which specified the design parameters for the system of his report has remained unpublished. It appears in this article in the form originally presented at the ASIS mid-year conference
of 1988. The article is significant because it represents the first identification of the components of a visual interface. |
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Visualizing Science by Citation Mapping
Henry Small The article by Henry Small of the Institute for Scientific Information addresses the two decade long historical use of visualization
techniques in calculating the relationships among scientific fields by their patterns of co-citation. Small begins with the simplest of algorithms as conceived within the computational limitations of the 1970's and ends
with the most ambitious ones presently available through Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). In this article, students and scholars will find algorithms applicable to many different aspects of the co-citation problem,
as Small frankly describes the research paths that were successful and led to further enhancements as well as the ones which were eventually discarded either because of their inefficiency in computation, or their
failure to yield truthful insights validated by earlier techniques. Many of these algorithms may be transplanted to address similar problems with data that may be encountered by researchers who require some
intermediate processing alternatives. |
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The Ecological Approach to Text Visualization
James A. Wise The article by Jim Wise of Integral Visuals Corporation details the technical advances of researchers at the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL) over an intense five year history of development. Wise's "The Ecological Approach to Text Visualization" offers a rich archive of techniques. This descriptive tour de
force begins with the most brutal techniques (e.g., vectors of length 200K analyzed through Multidimensional Scaling (MDS)) and, in completely clear and intelligible detail describes the short cut methods
developed for computational efficiency. These efforts have resulted in the presently available commercial product "ThemeMedia" offered through a subsidiary of the Smaby Group of investors (which purchased rights to
further develop the technology). Among the highlights of this article is a description of the discovery that single and multiple link cluster centroids can be used to approximate the full text collections originally
required for visual display. Additionally, the transformations of the 2d dot displays to the present terrain models simultaneously developed at PNNL and SNL are described in sufficient detail for engineers to
reproduce the same progression of results. |
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A Collection of Visual Thesauri for Browsing Large Collections of Geographic Images
Marshall C. Ramsey, Hsinchun Chen, Bin Zhu, and Bruce R. Schatz In Ramsay et al, earth observing
images are parsed as texts are parsed. These authors use Gabor filters to combine like terrains. No clearer description of this process is available in the present literature. A Gabor filter yields textures. By
segmenting images into component texture boundaries, search classes may be derived without resorting to textual description. This technology thus succeeds where the NASA effort by Rorvig et al failed. The results
reported in this article are concrete and verifiable; indeed, anyone who has ever traveled over Arizona highways can authenticate these data. The authors acknowledge the contributions of the Alexandria Digital Libraries
Project, particularly the work of Manjunath and Ma (1996), but claim their own extensions to this work as well. |
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Conference Notes--1996: Foundations of Advanced Information Visualization for Visual Information (Retrieval) Systems
Mark Rorvig and Matthias Hemmje One of the landmark developments
in visual retrieval occurred at a workshop held in Zurich in the summer of 1996 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval Annual Meeting. For the first
time, both European and North American interests were represented in the development of criteria for evaluation of visual information retrieval. Among the Europeans, the newly formed FADIVA (Foundations of Advanced
Information Visualization) group played the dominant role. The workshop report reproduced in this issue has been widely circulated, but never before published. This conference led to the first visualization of native
TREC/Tipster data as a prelude to formal visual information retrieval evaluation strategies (Rorvig and Fitzpatrick, 1998; Rorvig, 1998). [Robert Korfhage, one of the intellectual fathers of the visual information
retrieval effort in both Europe and North America, has contributed his bibliography on this issue. The bibliography is comprehensive for all work in this field c. 1997. Such documents are of interest in
determining the scope of future advances. In 1997, this was the known world view of this area of scholarly effort. For practical use in permitting users to copy this bibliography, it is available through the ASIS SIGVIZ
website http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGVIS/references.html where future editions may be conveniently updated.] |
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