Mindmap: Utilizing Multiple Taxonomies and Visualization to Understand a Document Collection

We present a novel system and methodology for browsing and exploring topics and concepts within a document collection. The process begins with the generation of multiple taxonomies from the document collections, each having a unique theme. These taxonomies then become an integral tool in the exploration of the document collection. It is assumed that the user of our system may have only a vague notion of exactly what they are attempting to understand, and would like to explore related topics and concepts rather than simply being given a set of documents. For this purpose, we have developed the MindMap interface to the document collection. Starting from an initial keyword query, the MindMap interface helps the user to explore the concept space by first presenting the user with related terms and high level topics in a radial graph. After refining the query by selecting any related terms, one of the related high level concepts can be selected for further investigation. The MindMap uses a novel binary tree interface to explore the composition of a concept based on the presence or absence of terms. From the binary tree a concept can be further explored and visualized. Individual documents are presented as spatial coordinates where distance between points relates to document similarity. As the user browses this spatial representation, text is presented from the document that is most relevant to the user’s initial query. Individual points can be selected to pull up the relevant paragraphs from the document with the keywords highlighted. Finally, selected documents are displayed and the user is allowed to further interact and investigate.