Information space

Chapter Benyon, D. (2005). Information space. Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, 344-347. Path of raw quantitative or qualitative data - leading to information (which we could call potentially meaningful data" - leading to knowledge (information that has been deployed in decision making and is relevant to people). Information Spaces can facilitate finding and using information. They involve representations, most often spacial or similar. "People often use the term coding for assigning numerical values to keywords or reformulating originally numerical data... A second task is normalization that is ensuring that the data are consistent an inherently comparable. " Visualizing information is important because: It allows the user to have some idea before submitting a query as to what type of outcome is possible. User information requirements are often fuzzily defined at the outset of the information search. Visualization can help the user before the user interacts with the information space Kohonen Self-Organizing Feature Maps (SOFM) is effective means for visual information retrieval user interface. Multidimensional scaling and unsupervised learning methods. Such an interactive visual user interface works in the following way. We consider a set of documents. The units clustered are authors, titles, and astronomical objects. The map is arranged to give a central position to a selected unit (e.g., a person— an astronomer). The annotations of paper titles or of astronomical objects shown in the regular grid are representative or important ones. Clicking on a location provides considerably greater detail in an additional panel relative to what is presented in a “global” visual view in the clickable visual interface. Keyword Based or Sparse Graph (links in XML)