Bead: explorations in information visualization

We describe work on the visualization of bibliographic data and, to aid in this task, the application of numerical techniques for multidimensional scaling.

Many areas of scientific research involve complex multivariate data. One example of this is Information Retrieval. Document comparisons may be done using a large number of variables. Such conditions do not favour the more well-known methods of visualization and graphical analysis, as it is rarely feasible to map each variable onto one aspect of even a three-dimensional, coloured and textured space.

Bead is a prototype system for the graphically-based exploration of information. In this system, articles in a bibliography are represented by particles in 3-space. By using physically-based modelling techniques to take advantage of fast methods for the approximation of potential fields, we represent the relationships between articles by their relative spatial positions. Inter-particle forces tend to make similar articles move closer to one another and dissimilar ones move apart. The result is a 3D scene which can be used to visualize patterns in the high-D information space.