VisGets

Marian Dörk
Sheelagh Carpendale
Carey Williamson
Christopher Collins

Overview

Given common search interfaces, it is difficult to gain orientation within large information spaces and explore information along conceptual dimensions such as time, location, and topics. Visual information exploration on the Web (VIEW) aims to support a more active way of finding and exploring information by the means of coordinated visualizations. Drawing from both visual information seeking and faceted navigation, interactive visualization widgets called VisGets combine graphical summaries and query formulation. VisGets provide the information seeker with visual overviews of multiple aspects of Web resources and a way to pose a search query visually within the Web-browser. This facilitates the construction of combined queries with temporal, spatial, and semantic constraints.

Open Demo

Images

Videos

Weighted brushing

Attach:view1.mp4 Download video: MPEG-4 (15.7 MB) Windows Media Video (4.2MB) Flash Video (6.1MB)

Multi-dimensional queries

Attach:view2.mp4 Download video: MPEG-4 (26.5 MB) Windows Media Video (13.4MB) Flash Video (7.2MB)

Publications

Marian Dörk, Carey Williamson and Sheelagh Carpendale. Navigating Tomorrow’s Web: From Searching and Browsing to Visual Exploration. ACM Transactions on the Web, 6(3):Article No. 13, September, 2012.
Marian Dörk, Sheelagh Carpendale and Carey Williamson. Visual Web Exploration: Beyond Ranked Snippets and Thumbnails. In Putting Visualization on the Web Workshop, VisWeek, 2009.
Marian Dörk, Carey Williamson and Sheelagh Carpendale. Towards Visual Web Search: Interactive Query Formulation and Search Result Visualization. In WSSP 2009: WWW Workshop on Web Search Result Summarization and Presentation, 2009.
Marian Dörk, Sheelagh Carpendale, Christopher Collins and Carey Williamson. VisGets: Coordinated Visualizations for Web-based Information Exploration and Discovery. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings Information Visualization 2008), 14(6):1205-1212, November-December, 2008.
Marian Dörk. Towards a Better VIEW: Visual Information Exploration on the Web. Master's thesis, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany, May, 2008.