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Abstract

Computers have become our companions in many of the activities we pursue in our life. They assist us, in particular, in searching relevant information that is needed to perform a variety of tasks, from professional usage to personal entertainment. They hold this information in a huge number of heterogeneous sources, either dedicated to a specific user community (e.g., enterprise databases) or maintained for the general public (e.g., websites and digital libraries). Whereas progress in basic information technology is nowadays capable of guaranteeing effective information management, information retrieval and dissemination has become a core issue that needs further accomplishments to achieve user satisfaction. The research communities in databases, information retrieval, information visualization, and human-computer interaction have already largely investigated these domains. However, the technical environment has so dramatically evolved in recent years, inducing a parallel and very significant evolution in user habits and expectations, that new approaches are definitely needed to meet current demand. One of the most evident and significant changes is the human-computer interaction paradigm. Traditional interactions relayed an programming to express user information requirements in formal code and an textual output to convey to users the information extracted by the system. Except for professional data-intensive application frameworks, still in the hands of computer speciahsts, we have basically moved away from this pattern both in terms of expressing information requests and conveying results. The new goal is direct interaction with the final user (the person who is looking for information and is not necessarily familiar with computer technology). The key motto to achieve this is "go visual." The well-known high bandwidth of the human-vision channel allows both recognition and understanding of large quantities of information in no more than a few seconds. Thus, for instance, if the result of an information request can be organized as a visual display, or a sequence of visual displays, the information throughput is immensely superior to the one that can be achieved using textual support. User interaction becomes an iterative query-answer game that very rapidly leads to the desired final result. Conversely, the system can provide efficient visual support for easy query formulation. Displaying a visual representation of the information space, for instance, lets users directly point at the information they are looking for, without any need to be trained into the complex syntax of current query languages. Alternatively, users can navigate in the information space, following visible paths that will lead them to the targeted items. Again, thanks to the visual support, users are able to easily understand how to formulate queries and they are likely to achieve the task more rapidly and less prone to errors than with traditional textual interaction modes.
The two facets of "going visual" are usually referred to as visual query systems, for query formulation, and information visualization, for result display. Visual Query Systems (VQSs) are defined as systems for querying databases that use a visual representation to depict the domain of interest and express related requests. VQSs provide both a language to express the queries in a visual format and a variety of functionalities to facilitate user-system interaction. As such, they are oriented toward a wide spectrum of users, especially novices who have limited computer expertise and generally ignore the inner structure of the accessed database. Information visualization, an increasingly important subdiscipline within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), focuses an visual mechanisms designed to communicate clearly to the user the structure of information and improve an the cost of accessing large data repositories. In printed form, information visualization has included the display of numerical data (e.g., bar charts, plot charts, pie charts), combinatorial relations (e.g., drawings of graphs), and geographic data (e.g., encoded maps). In addition to these "static" displays, computer-based systems, such as the Information Visualizer and Dynamic Queries, have coupled powerful visualization techniques (e.g., 3D, animation) with near real-time interactivity (i.e., the ability of the system to respond quickly to the user's direct manipulation commands). Information visualization is tightly combined with querying capabilities in some recent database-centered approaches. More opportunities for information visualization in a database environment may be found today in data mining and data warehousing applications, which typically access large data repositories. The enormous quantity of information sources an the World-Wide Web (WWW) available to users with diverse capabilities also calls for visualization techniques. In this article, we survey the main features and main proposals for visual query systems and touch upon the visualization of results mainly discussing traditional visualization forms. A discussion of modern database visualization techniques may be found elsewhere. Many related articles by Daniel Keim are available at http://www. informatik.uni-halle.de/dbs/publications.html.

Source

Encyclopedia of library and information science. Vol.72, [=Suppl.35]