Information Visualization Interfaces for Retrieval and Analysis (IVIRA)
Workshop Summary
Javed Mostafa
Laboratory for Applied Informatics Research<http://lair.indiana.edu>
Indiana University, Rm. 011D, 10th Street & Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, IN. 47405
jm@indiana.edu
Katy Börner
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University, 10th Street & Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, IN. 47405
katy@indiana.edu
The IVIRA workshop was held on Saturday May 31st in conjunction with the Joint Conference on
Digital Libraries 2003 at the Rice University Campus in Houston, Texas. Katy Börner and Javed
Mostafa jointly organized the workshop.
Javed Mostafa opened the half-day with a brief introduction in which he summarized thesignificance of three key areas in information retrieval visualization: functions, infrastructure, andevaluation.
Functions of IV/IR systems include "prototypical" ones such as browse, search, refinement, andpresentation. However, increasingly users demand more — features and tools to help theminteractively mine data, generate patterns, and conduct analysis on data.
In IV/IR systems the computing infrastructure plays a critical role by providing access to different
standard corpora for training and testing systems, pre-established results for validation, and welltested modules to reduce development time.
Evaluation is a related area requiring attention especially in an emerging field such as information
visualization as evaluation can guide development and ensure that new techniques are based on
sound empirical studies.
Javed concluded his introduction by observing that IV/IR systems are now being developed andused in a wide variety of application domains, ranging from music to proteomics; hence, it isimperative that researchers and practitioners reflect on the three general areas (i.e., function,infrastructure, and evaluation) in terms of domain-level implications.
Seven papers were presented at the workshop, each lasting approximately 20 minutes. Thevisualization approaches discussed can be grouped into three broad categories: user-centered,
metadata-driven, and data mining applied on raw data.
The first paper entitled "Collection understanding through streaming collage" was presented byMichelle Chang. She discussed a technique that is unusual in that its main aim is to support
comprehensive understanding of an image collection instead of facilitating retrieval of a narrowsubset from the collection. The presentation method takes advantage of Andruid Kerne's "Collage
Machine" to generate streaming collages from the collection. Users can review randomly
produced collages from thecollection, manipulate collages by moving around individual images displayed, or filter collages byspecifying metadata values associated with images. This is an example of a user-centeredapproach with significant control given to the user for manipulating the presentation ofinformation.
The second presentation was by Yueye Fu and focused on visualization of email-boxes with themain goal of identifying patterns in communication behavior. A set of emails related to acollaborative software development project was used as the "collection" to illustrate theapplication of the Treemap visualization algorithm. Two Treemap visualizations were produced:
one that coded individual senders differently based on the amount of emails each contributed andthe other grouped emails based on specific projects. The Treemap approach presented is an
example of a basic data mining techniqueapplied on raw data to produce visualizations.
Eric Isaacson was the third presenter and his paper dealt with content visualization of a music
digital library. Eric discussed several techniques that aid in visualizing musical scores and atechnique that permits display of different homogeneous sections of music over time. An
important aspect of the visualization techniques discussed by Eric was the fact that they permit
the user to annotate or "edit" the presentation and thus provide a significant degree of control tothe user to manipulate the visualization.
Following a brief break after the third presentation, the workshop continued with a presentation by
Carlos Monroy. He described a system to create, visualize, and analyze series of art objects. For
a given collection of art object images, the system permits the user to browse and select asubset, group them as a series, and save the series. Thus the user can build a catalog of selfcreated series. Additional functions offered include analysis of series content by creation timeline, animation of series content, and comparison of up to four series in parallel. This system isalso a good example of a user-centered approach.
Next, Rao Shen described the GetSmart project — a collaborative effort between Virginia Techand University of Arizona to integrate digital library tools in education. For this project, aknowledge visualization method has been implemented called "concept maps": the method
involves displaying prominent concepts and association as a network graph with connection
among nodes representing associations among concepts. Rao mentioned that such maps havebeen helpful in summarizing the main themes of a domain, allowing students to check their own
understanding, and promoting collaborations.
The next paper presented was on development of a search system named Oncosifter that allows
users to locate information on cancer using multiple means. One particular function supported bythis system is search based on visualization of key concepts. The system maintains a databaseof "consumer health vocabularies" that are presented to the user as hyperbolic tree structure –the user can begin at any of the dozen or so top level concept nodes and gradually refine theinformation needed by selecting lower level concepts that are also presented as clusteredbranches in the visualization. Based on the concepts selected the MedlinePlus and CancerGovdatabases are queried to retrieve related documents. Oncosifter is an example of a system thatgenerates visualization from metadata that are then used to support retrieval functions.
The final paper was presented by James Cooper of IBM who discussed development of aconcept relation discovery system in the biomedical domain. It uses a noun and technical term
discovery library called JTalent, the output of which is filtered using the Medical Subject Headings(MeSH) dictionary. The MeSH dictionary is used to identify biomedical terms and a mutual
information formula is employed to calculate association weights among terms. Finally, using aspring graph algorithm, the terms and term associations are displayed for the user to browse.
This research is clearly in the category of data mining applied on raw text.
The workshop concluded with a brief discussion of the highlights of the presented techniques andhow they relate to the basic taxonomy of user-centered, metadata-driven, and data mining
approaches. It was pointed out by Javed that the workshop was being held in conjunction with
one of the major digital libraries forums, and it is not unrealistic to expect that a large digital library
may cover the whole range of basic data formats, i.e., text, image, audio, and video. Hence, achallenge for researchers and practitioners is to develop scalable information visualization
techniques that can also be generalized across heterogeneous data formats.

Papers as well as presentation slides of all talks are online at <http://vw.indiana.edu/ivira03>.
Acknowledgments
The organizers are grateful to the program committee members who helped in reviewing papers.
They are:
Kevin Boyack, Sandia National Laboratory, USA
Robin Burke, DePaul University, USA
Chaomei Chen, Drexel University, USA
Martin Dodge, University College London, UKJames French, University of Virginia Charlottesville, USA
Xia Lin, Drexel University, USA
André Skupin, University of New Orleans, USA
Kiduk Yang, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Related Sites:
SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis, San Jose, CA, USA, January 18-22, 2004.
<http://vw.indiana.edu/vda2004>.
Special Issue on Collaborative Information Visualization Environments in PRESENCE:
Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. Submission Deadline: September 1st, 2003.
<http://vw.indiana.edu/cive03/03-cive-presence.pdf>.
Symposium on Collaborative Information Visualization Environments, IV 2003, London, UK, July
16-18, 2003. <http://vw.indiana.edu/cive03>.