Using Topic Maps for Visually Exploring Various Data Sources in a Web-Based Environment

  • Authors:
  • Eicke Godehardt;Nadeem Bhatti

  • Affiliations:
  • SAP AG, Germany and Fraunhofer IGD, Germany;Fraunhofer IGD, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Scaling Topic Maps
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Today every company and every single person owns a lot of data. However, easy ways for exploration and navigation are not very widespread. Especially, if complex relations between these data are defined and the amount of data becomes bigger, an easy to use interface is necessary.This paper describes a topic map viewer, which is easy embeddable into websites to offer none-experts an innovative way to find new and relevant information. To display even huge information spaces in a web environment, this paper describes two concepts supporting scalability are explained, namely data exchange and visualization. For the data exchange between client and server pre-fetching mechanism is introduced to load data in small chunks. Garbage collection complements this to prevent overloading of the viewer by unloading not needed topics. Furthermore the clustering concept for the visualization is used to handle the huge amount of information.