GeoVIBE: A Visual Interface to Geographic Digital Library

This paper explores the possibilities of visualizing document similarities and differences in both spatial and topical domains. Building on previous studies of geographical information retrieval and textual information retrieval (IR) systems, we report on the development of an information browsing tool, GeoVIBE. The system consists of two types of browsing windows, GeoView and VibeView, that work in coordination for visual navigation in the document space. GeoView imposes a geographical order to the document space based on the idea of hypermaps where "icons" and "footprints" may be embedded in maps as the clickable hotspots linking to relevant documents. VibeView is a visual presentation of document similarity space defined by multiple reference points. By smooth integration of two browsing strategies, GeoVIBE enables users to search information using geographic clues as well as conceptual clues. Document relevance may be judged visually by inspecting spatial arrangement and relations of documents in a map view and the similarities among documents defined on a vector space model. Some future research are identified as critical to enable GeoVIBE as a powerful information searching environment.