Empirical Study of a 3D Visualization for Information Retrieval Tasks

  • Authors:

  • Gregory B. Newby

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB 3360 Manning Hall, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3360, USA. gbnewby@ils.unc.edu

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Special issue: A survey of research questions for intelligent information systems in education
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

There are many challenges to visualizing information including choosing between 2D and 3D interfaces, navigation and interaction methods, and selecting an appropriate level of detail. Visualizing information retrieval (IR) search results, including Web search engine results, poses additional challenges, notably the determination of appropriate relative locations for terms and document in a visual display. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and related techniques offer approaches to visualizing relations among terms and documents. In this work, “information space” is presented as a framework for discussing relations among terms and documents, and a technique related to LSI is utilized to generate information spaces from IR search results. This paper provides an overview of more than three decades of work on information visualization, identifying several trends and some relatively unexplored areas. An experimental evaluation of a prototype interface for visualizing IR results is described. Results indicate that the 3D navigation interface for IR search results was usable, but that subjects had difficulty with some aspects. Further study and development of 2D and 3D methods for interacting with retrieval search results is suggested.