Information Search and Visualization

Older Terms

• Information retrieval
• Database management
• Expert systems

Newer Terms

• Data mining
• Data warehousing
• Knowledge networks

Task objects - represented by interface objects in databases

Structured relational databases - are composed of relations and schema for representing those relations

Records (n-tuples) - items defining relationships

Attributes or fields - atomic items making up records

Textual document library - set of collections and attributes describing library

Multimedia document library - may also have images, sounds, videos, etc.

Task actions like fact finding are represented decomposed into browsing or searching and are represented by interface actions like scrolling, zooming, or linking

Text Search Interface Framework

• Formulation (expressing the search)
• Action (launching the search)
• Results (reading messages and outcomes)
• Refinement (formulating next step)

Search Strategies

• Full-text string search
• Formulated field search
• Controlled vocabulary index search
• Back of book or table of contents search
• Concordance or key word in context (KWIC) search

• Rainbow search (e.g. skip to next boldface word)
• Search expansion (across documents)

Multimedia Document Search

• Photo search (e.g. query by image content - QBIC)
• Map search (e.g. search by feature)
• Design or diagram search
• Sound search
• Video search
• Animation search

Data Type Task Taxonomy

• 1D linear search
• 2D map data
• 3D worlds
• temporal data
• multimedia data

Tasks

• Overview
• Zoom
• Filter
• Relationships
• History task
• Extract task