Periscope

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Periscope A System for Adaptive 3D
Visualization of Search Results

• By
• Wojciech Wiza, Krzysztof Walczak
• Wojciech Cellary

Presented by Gautam Nimmagadda
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Authors
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Wojciech Wiza, Ph.D.

• Poznan University of Economics, Poland
• Department of Information Technology
• Research Areas
• Virtual Reality
• Computer 3D Graphics
• Information Visualization
• Internet Intranet Systems
• Search Systems
• XML Applications

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Krzysztof Walczak, Ph.D.

• Asst. Professor, Poznan University of Economics,
  Poland
• Department of Information Technology
• Research Areas
• Virtual Reality
• Multimedia Systems
• Interactive Television
• Internet and Intranet Systems
• Databases

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Wojciech Cellary, Ph.D.

• Poznan University of Economics, Poland
• Head of Department of Information Technology
• Research Areas
• Internet Technologies
• Multimedia Electronic Business
• Information Society
• Database modeling of Virtual Reality

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What is the problem under study?

• Presentation interface of the search results
• Lists of resources found with a short description

What is the problem with the current interface?
The current interface is not the best for
Information Search Tasks as a user is looking for
holistic presentation of the search results
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How else can we present the results?

• Graphical representation of data
• 2D map or a 3D scene

The authors choose 3D scene to visualize the
search results as they believe it provides better
user interaction, user cognition greater
information capacity
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Related Work in 3D Visualization

• Visualization projects of Large Data at HCIL
• Visualization of Massive Newsfeed in 3D by Rossi
  and Varga
• NIRVE project at NIST
• VR-VIBE at University of Nottingham
• ViOS by Julian Lombardi
• Starlight System at PNNL

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NIRVE (NIST Information Retrieval Engine)
Visualization of Search Results A Comparative
Evaluation of Text, 2D, and 3D Interfaces(1999)
by Cugini et al.
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NIRVE (NIST Information Retrieval Engine)

• Visualization of Search Results A Comparative
  Evaluation of Text, 2D, and 3D Interfaces by the
  NIRVE team
• Study showed that the available features and
  the required tasks seemed to matter more than the
  dimensionality of the visualization

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VR-VIBE
http//www.emptiness.org/vr/vrvibe.html
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ViOS (Visual Internet Operating System)
http//www.howstuffworks.com/vios.htm
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Problems in the earlier systems

• Only one interface environment
• Limited information capacity

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AVE Adaptive Visualization Environments

• Automatically selects an interface, from a
  collection of available interfaces, that best
  fits the search results
• Allows user to influence the selection
• Presents a global view by visualizing all the
  results returned by search engine
• Three types of interfaces depending on search
  result volume holistic, analytic and hybrid
  interfaces

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Periscope System

• Prototype system based on AVE
• Acts as an intermediary layer between a user and
  indexing search engines
• Based on X-VRML (Extensive Virtual Reality
  Modeling Language)

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Periscope System
Visualization engine coverts the text results to
3D scene Metamodels choose an appropriate
Interface Model for the Visualization Engine to
automatically generate a 3D scene
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Periscope System

• Metamodels
• An X-VRML program used by Periscope system to
  select an appropriate Interface Model when a
  request for Interface Model change is received
• Uses static and dynamic routes
• Static routes are hardwired
• Dynamic routes chose an Interface Model depending
  upon algorithm in Metamodel, data from DB and
  parameters provided by the user

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Periscope System

• Interface Models an abstract collection of
  interface models
• Composed of three parts 3D Scene Model,
  Interaction Interface and 2D User Interface

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Periscope System

• Interface Model Selection
• Based on interface readability paradigm by Wiza
  et al. (2003)
• Facet F is a pair (i, ci)
• i is a visualization dimension
• ci represents visualization dimension capacity,
  maximum values i can have in an interface model

• n is the maximum number of objects

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Periscope System

• Aggregation tables created to determine which
  holistic interface is to be used
• Table created based on document attributes
• Each aggregation table is built on unique subset
  of the set of attributes of the documents

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Periscope System

• Interface is selected based on best possible fit
  between aggregation table, interface model and
  mapping of attributes
• Each of the aggregation tables is matched against
  all Interface Models based on some rules using
  the readability properties F (i, ci) n.

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Sample Interfaces

• Holistic interface
• Two visualization dimensions
• Each sphere represents language of documents
• Each slice represents distribution of documents
  within DNS domains

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Sample Interfaces

• Analytic interface
• 7 visualization dimensions
• More details of each object
• Useful for detailed analysis of smaller data set

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Sample Interfaces

• Hybrid Interface
• Holistic view of all documents
• Additional visualization dimension color provides
  details of the files

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Conclusions

• Periscope
• Provides global view
• Provides novel user interface
• Provides multiple interactive interfaces
• Allows model switching
• Customized attribute mapping
• Supports comparative searches

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Future Work

• Improvements in interface selection method
• Development of new interfaces

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Usefulness of Periscope

• Feedback from users that have used Periscope
  confirms that the idea of three-dimensional
  visualization of search results is accepted
  especially as a tool complementary to the
  traditional search engines
• A Method of Holistic 3D Visualization of
  Arbitrarily Large Datasets (2005) by the same
  team

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Usefulness of Periscope

• No study evaluating the system is presented
• Previous study of NIRVE showed contrasting
  results to the authors claims
• Value of Periscope remains unclear

More useful in data warehousing data mining?
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Assumptions

• There is a need of the global view of results in
  a search task
• Little justification, maybe more illustrative
  examples?
• Document properties like size and language useful
  in a holistic view of the search result
• Are they properties that users look for?

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Questions