Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Using Synchronised Tag Clouds for Browsing
Data Collections
Alexandre de Spindler, Stefania Leone, Michael Nebeling,
Matthias Geel, and Moira C. Norrie
Institute for Information Systems, ETH Zurich
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
{
despindler,leone,nebeling,geel,norrie
}
@inf.ethz.ch
Abstract.
Tag clouds have become a popular means of visualising and
browsing data, especially in Web 2.0 applications. We show how they
can be used to provide flexible and intuitive interfaces to web search ser-
vices over data collections by using multiple synchronised tag clouds to
browse that data. A data collection can have alternative tag clouds and
a tag cloud alternative visualisations, with the choice of tag cloud and
visualisation at any time controlled by a combination of user selection,
developer specification and default system behaviour. A search interface
is defined by an augmented data model that specifies the viewer classes,
their associated tag clouds and the visualisations of these tag clouds.
We demonstrate the approach by describing how we implemented a web
application to browse data related to researchers and their publications.
Keywords:
search service, tag clouds, data browsing, data visualisation.
1
Introduction
Tag clouds and faceted browsing have been used to address the challenge of
providing users with intuitive interfaces to web search services. They offer visu-
alisations of data collections that allow users to construct search queries through
simple data selection. While faceted browsing allows complex search queries over
a data collection to be constructed in a multi-step refinement process, tag clouds
typically support only simple selections. However, the advantage of tag clouds is
their capability to represent multiple features of a data collection within a single
visualisation.
In this paper, we show how we have extended the use of tag clouds to allow
the formulation of complex search queries by developing a browser that can offer
multiple synchronised tag clouds to visualise the data stored in one or more data
collections. By supporting alternative tag cloud representations for selected data
collections within a database as well as alternative visualisations, we are able to
combine features of tag clouds and faceted browsing.
The application developer can configure the browser through an extension
of the data modelling language that is used to specify the view model of the
database. We present an extension of SQL used to define the view model and the
