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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.