Interacting with databases in the global information infrastructure

The interpretation and understanding of large quantities of data are challenges for users when interpreting the Information Visualization (VI) techniques, which is important as it makes the appropriate acquisition of the information through the visualization possible. The choice of the most appropriate information visualization method before commencing with the resolution of a given visual problem is primordial to obtaining an efficient solution. The implementation of the model involves choosing components and the architecture that stands its necessary functions effectively. This thesis has as its objective to describe an information visualization classification approach based on treemap, which is able to identify the best information visualization model for a given problem. From the treemap it is possible to elaborate strategy in the dictionary form of adequate Information Visualization techniques. Firstly, the actual state of the visualization field is described, and then the rules and criteria used in our research a program evaluating a new strategy for the presentation of visualization techniques are shown, able of detach and prioritizing the user interest techniques. Besides this, a comparative case study is presented with the information contained in another techniques visualization dictionary, the main correlate, called the Periodic Table of VI. The comparison is based on the usability and analysis of the cognitive complexity in the execution time of the user tasks in the information search. Finally, an evaluation of the results is presented through the experiments conducted with users and a comparative analysis of the techniques based on Treemap and the Periodic Table. The final results show that the VI Treemap presents itself as the best classification option regarding usability, availability and search performance, in relation to the other correlates work.

Chapter 2 - Information Visualization: Scope, Techniques and Opportunities for Geovisualization

We present a system to extract, visualise and analyse inter-corporation relationships disclosed by public companies in their annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In improving the transparency of these disclosures, we allow policymakers, analysts, investors and the general public to analyse these relationships at both the firm level and the industry level. Using probabilistic information retrieval and extraction techniques, we automatically extract a dataset of 45,000 relationships between 26,000 companies from over 15 GB of SEC 10-K documents. These relationships range from ownerships, agreements and personal connections to competition and legal disagreements. Information visualisation and social network analytic techniques can then be applied to explore and analyse the dataset.

Visual MRI: Merging information visualization and non-parametric clustering techniques for MRI dataset analysis

A global infrastructure is emerging in the 21ST century in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are becoming more and more pervasive. Dynamic innovation processes continue to give rise to the social and technological capabilities that could release the potential of ICT for development. Products produced in this diverse field have a wide application in society. It is a field that developing countries need to harness and develop considerable technical competence. Governments, businesses and other stakeholders in developing countries need to coordinate their actions in order to amplify the social and economic benefits of ICTs and to reduce the risk of exclusion. This paper presents a perspective of the ICT infrastructure in Zimbabwe. The increasing spread of ICT opens new opportunities for Zimbabwe to harness these technologies and services to serve its development goals. By investing in its national information infrastructures, Zimbabwe can experience the predicted social and economic benefits of a global information infrastructure. The paper gives a detailed coverage of recommendations for the case of Zimbabwe.

Analyzing the solutions of DEA through information visualization and data mining techniques: SmartDEA framework

인터넷과 대용량 데이터베이스가 정보검색환경을 주도하게 되면서 이용자가 원하는 정보를 효율적으로 찾을 수 있는 강력한 검색도구가 요구되었다. 정보시각화 기법은 이러한 요구에 부응하여 개발된 것으로 복잡하고도 대규모의 데이터를 의미적으로 그리고 조직적으로 보여주는 시각표상 기법이라 할 수 있다. 본 연구는 정보검색시스템에서 다각적으로 응용되고 있는 정보시각화 기법을 조사 분석하였다. 그 결과, 첫째 연구결과 데이터, 검색대상인 문헌, 검색결과로 나타난 검색정보를 시각화 대상으로 하여 연구가 진행되고 있었다. 둘째, 이용자의 상호작용과 항해를 수월하게 하는 정보시각화 기법으로는 줌과 팬기법, focus+ context기법, 점증탐사기법, 클러스터링 기법 둥을 들 수 있다. 셋째, 이용자에게 실제 시각메타포로 보여주는 방식으로 선형구조 표현방식, 계층구조 표현방식, 네트워크구조 표현방식, 벡터분산구조 표현방식을 찾아볼 수 있었다. 정보검색시스템에 계속적으로 정보시각화 기법이 응용되고 구현되기 위해서는 기존 기법의 평가와 이용자 요구분석이 수행되어야 하므로 본 연구의 결과 또한 새로운 시각화 인터페이스 개발에 도움이 될 것으로 본다. Information visualization in information retrieval is a creating tool that enables us to observe, manipulate, search, navigate, explore, filter, discover, understand, interact with large volumes of data for more rapidly and far more effectively to discover hidden patterns. The focus of this study is to investigate and analyze information visualization techniques in information retrieval system in the three-schematic levels. In result, it was found that first, scientific data, documents, and retrieval result information are visualized through various techniques. Second, information visualization techniques which facilitate navigation and interaction are zoom and pan, focus+context techniques, incremental exploration, and clustering. Third, the visual metaphors used by the visualization systems are presented in the linear structure, hierarchy structure, network structure, and vector scatter structure.

The information industry is the main branch of the modern economy. The processes of informatization lead to qualitative changes in society itself in the direction of acquiring sustainable features of the modern information society, the technological basis of which is the global information infrastructure (GII). GII provides free access to information resources to every inhabitant of the planet and provides a set of communication services that provide an open set of applications, covers all types of information and provides the opportunity to receive it anywhere, anytime, at an affordable price and at an affordable price quality. The creation and operation of modern satellite communication systems contributes to the creation of a global information infrastructure. Satellite communications, which is a promising component of modern cyberspace infrastructure, is qualitatively changing the entire telecommunications industry and affecting the usual way of life. Personal satellite communication systems have significant advantages over mobile communication systems. Today, the use of new spacecraft with improved characteristics is expected, which will represent almost the entire range of satellite services. According to documents submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission, satellites in space will «communicate» with each other at a frequency of more than 10 thousand GHz using a laser beam. Ground stations and user terminals will be communicated on 12 GHz radio bands. The promised data rate is 1 Gbps for each consumer. Regarding potential Starlink applications, SpaceX’s management points to the risky nature of the low-bandwidth broadband satellite business and adds that SpaceX plans to use its Starlink satellites not only to provide broadband Internet connectivity in remote areas of the world, but also to connect on other planets.

The Web has become a large repository of documents (or pages) written in many different languages. In this context, traditional information retrieval (IR) techniques cannot be used whenever the user query and the documents being retrieved are in different languages. To address this problem, new cross‐language information retrieval (CLIR) techniques have been proposed. In this work, we describe a method for cross‐language retrieval of medical information. This method combines query terms and related medical concepts obtained automatically through a categorization procedure. The medical concepts are used to create a linguistic abstraction that allows retrieval of information in a language‐independent way, minimizing linguistic problems such as polysemy. To evaluate our method, we carried out experiments using the OHSUMED test collection, whose documents are written in English, with queries expressed in Portuguese, Spanish, and French. The results indicate that our cross‐language retrieval method is as effective as a standard vector space model algorithm operating on queries and documents in the same language. Further, our results are better than previous results in the literature.

Network and service management encompasses a set of activities, methods, procedures, and tools, whose ultimate goal is to guarantee the proper functioning of a networked system. Computational tools are essential to help network administrators in their daily tasks, and information visualization techniques are of great value in such context. In essence, information visualization techniques associated to visual analytics aim at facilitating the tasks of network administrators in the process of monitoring and maintaining the network health. This paper surveys the use of information visualization techniques as a tool to support the network and service management process. Through a systematic literature review (SLR), we provide a historical overview and discuss the current state of the art in the field. We present a classification of 285 articles and papers from 1985 to 2013, according to an information visualization taxonomy, as well as a network and service management taxonomy. Finally, we point out future research directions and opportunities regarding the use of information visualization in network and service management.

Understanding information about software artifacts is key to successful Agile software development projects, however, sharing information about artifacts is difficult to achieve amongst team members. There are many information visualization techniques used to help address the difficulties of knowledge sharing, but it is not clear what is the most effective technique. This paper presents the results of a systematic mapping study of existing literature on information visualization techniques used by Agile software development teams. The results of the systematic mapping show that Agile teams use visualization techniques for designing, developing, communicating, and tracking progress. Our findings show that visualization techniques help Agile teams increase knowledge sharing and raise awareness about software artifacts amongst team members.

The Internet is a rapidly growing global network of networks. Users employ the Internet to search for and retrieve information, access remote resources, and collaborate with other users. More and more information is becoming available on the Internet. Networked information discovery and retrieval (NIDR) tools, such as Gopher, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and World Wide Web (WWW), have been developed to assist users with searching and retrieving a wide variety of information on the Internet. NIDR tools are becoming increasingly popular due to their ease of use and powerful navigation and surfing capabilities. Security is becoming an increasingly important topic regarding the use of NIDR tools. This paper identifies current and planned NIDR security capabilities and provides security recommendations for administrators and commercial NIDR providers. >

In the last decade, the growing interest in evaluation of information visualization techniques is a clear indication that usability and user experience are very important quality criteria in this context. However, beyond this level of agreement there is much room for discussion about how to extend the variety of usability evaluation approaches for assessing information visualization techniques, and how to determine which ones are the most effective, and in what ways and for what purposes. In this chapter we take a user centered, Human-Computer Interaction-based perspective to discuss usability evaluation of information visualization techniques. We begin by presenting a singular view of the evolution of visualization techniques evaluation, briefly summarizing the main contributions of several works in this area since its humble beginning as a collateral activity until the recent growth of interest. Then, we focus on current issues related to such evaluations, particularly concerning the way they are designed and conducted, taking into account a background of well-known usability evaluation methods from HCI to help understanding why there are still open problems. A set of guidelines for a (more) user-centered usability evaluation of information visualization techniques is proposed and discussed. Our ultimate goal is to provide some insight regarding if and how sound ergonomic user-centered knowledge can be transferred to the information visualization context.

Information visualization is the art and science of representing abstract information in a visual form that enables human users to gain insight through their perceptual and cognitive capabilities. In this chapter, we examine some key human factors aspects of information visualizations. We begin with an overview of major information visualization principles and techniques, with background on human factors issues that drove the development of those principles and techniques. Next, we look at how human capabilities are best used by visualization, focusing on the use of animation in visualizations. Then we look at the emerging area of large display visualization, examining how visualization changes when a user cannot easily see the entire visualization in detail. We then discuss evaluation of information visualizations, discussing aspects of utility and usability. We conclude by discussing remaining challenges in information visualization and how the field is changing today.

An efficient database is an essential component of organizing diverse information on image metadata and patient information for research in medical imaging. This paper describes the design, development and deployment of a large database system serving as a brain image repository that can be used across different platforms in various medical researches. It forms the infrastructure that links hospitals and institutions together and shares data among them. The database contains patient-, pathology-, image-, research- and management-specific data. The functionalities of the database system include image uploading, storage, indexing, downloading and sharing as well as database querying and management with security and data anonymization concerns well taken care of. The structure of database is multi-tier client-server architecture with Relational Database Management System, Security Layer, Application Layer and User Interface. Image source adapter has been developed to handle most of the popular image formats. The database has a user interface based on web browsers and is easy to handle. We have used Java programming language for its platform independency and vast function libraries. The brain image database can sort data according to clinically relevant information. This can be effectively used in research from the clinicians’ points of view. The database is suitable for validation of algorithms on large population of cases. Medical images for processing could be identified and organized based on information in image metadata. Clinical research in various pathologies can thus be performed with greater efficiency and large image repositories can be managed more effectively. The prototype of the system has been installed in a few hospitals and is working to the satisfaction of the clinicians.