The user may add or delete terms, causing corresponding changes in the set of documents displayed, and in their positions. The user may click a document marker one or more times to learn progressively more about it, and may mark documents they judge to be relevant or nonrelevant. Starfield displays are most useful for large and diverse document sets, resulting from an early general query. Rich display, as opposed to multiple displays. The cognitive burden of understanding a rich display, even one showing abbreviated or iconified information, appears to be less than required for switching between displays.
All active elements are visible, and respond to mouse-overs.
Two levels of response, providing quick summaries, and further information on request. This version offers several Starfields, to present multiple views of the document and term spaces. The only remaining conventional list is a ranked list of titles. We begin by producing a list of the terms in all the query documents, keeping only those which are proportionally more frequent in the query documents than in the collection as a whole. Any ratio greater than one suggests keeping this term, but we set the cutoff a bit higher in practice, to keep the number of key terms reasonable.