D11: Information Architecture: Evaluation of tools and methods

Of this deliverable, the full document (in pdf, 1,17 MB) is also available.

Presentation of Document

For a presentation click here (PowerPoint, 128KB).

Information about the document:

Project Number: IST-2001-32429
Project Acronym: ICONS
Title: Information Architecture: Evaluation of tools and methods
Deliverable No.: D11
Due date: 18.11.02
Delivery Date: 30.11.02
Partners owning: ICS
Partners contributed: -
Made available to: Public document

Short Description:

This report presents the state-of-the art in the research concerning visualization of data in large databases/repositories, visualization of Web resources, paradigms for both data visual representation, visual query languages, and visual presentation of query results. The literature on the above topics is extremely rich – we have collected many papers, software descriptions and other materials. The literature can be roughly classified into following (non-disjoint) topics:

Generic paradigms for data graphical presentation, query formulation by means of graphical primitives and visual presentation of query results.
Domain-specific tools for graphical presentation of information or knowledge (e.g. geographical),
Graphical data mining tools that allow visualizing information in a form allowing analytical processing and decision support.
Visualization supporting user awareness, e.g. in a maze of Web pages.
Graph visualization tools, based on different visualization paradigms.

Because of our limited resources, we have subdivided this literature into two sections: irrelevant to ICONS and relevant to ICONS. We consider all domain-specific methods as irrelevant because the ICONS project is to be a generic system rather than a system dedicated to a specific “vertical” application domain. Because of huge diversity of approaches and visualisation paradigms we try attempt to make taxonomy among existing or proposed solutions.

Because no specific budget for licensing concerning commercial graphical software (which is rather expensive), investigations into selected tools and methods for GUI interfaces have been limited to some publicly available free software. The requirements for a GUI are based on visual graphic querying metaphors assumed for the ICONS project, which are the result of literature search, own research and experiments. It is assumed that two basic metaphors are to be implemented: extensional navigation in an explicitly presented graph of objects, and intentional navigation in an implicitly presented graph of objects representing the UML-like database schema. Requirements to these metaphors are augmented by requirements that address the support for user awareness, recording visual querying results, graph layouts and operations on graphs.