MultiMap, a RIA for Exploratory Search by Real-Time Generation of Similarity Maps

Users who cannot formulate a precise query but know there must be a good answer somewhere, often rely on exploratory search. This requires an interactive and responsive system, or else the user will soon give up. As data bases are becoming larger, more specialized, and more distributed this calls for a Rich Internet Application, fast enough to keep pace with the users explorations. This thesis studies and implements a system, called MultiMap, which computes similarity maps in real-time. This entailed: (1) precomputing every data structure that does not change after the initial query, (2) optimizing algorithms for zooming and map generation (3) and providing a cognitively appropriate visualization of high dimensional space. Applied to a very large movie database, it resulted in a highly responsive, satisfying, usable system.

Thesis: http://www.au-crepuscule.com/private/MScThesis.pdf

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• exploratory
• search
• interfaces
• visualization
• flash
• RIA
• responsiveness
• pivot
• zoom
• slice
• and
• dice