The Effects of Interactive Visualisation Techniques on Queries in Structured Information Spaces

The successful and efficient querying of information in electronic information pools is becoming increasingly important in today’s information society. At the same time the quantity of existing information is continually growing. Querying scientific literature and selecting relevant hits are typical examples for this. [Börner and Chen 02] present possibilities to display structured information pools visually in order to simplify querying and selection processes. However, current interaction possibilities are limited to the manipulation of hit images (cutting out, zooming, rotating). The structure features of the underlying information pool remain unconsidered. Our JADE interface uses this structure information additionally to support the refinement task as well as the navigation within the space of query hits. It is based on mathematical procedures known as formal concept analysis. We carried out an evaluation study in order to determine the efficiency of the interactive visualisation techniques provided by JADE. Psychology students were made to perform various query tasks with a literature database. One group worked with a common web interface. The other group worked with JADE. The query results articulate a clear advantage for utilising interactive visualisation techniques in regard to the common parameters of query tasks, precision and recall.