14787313
ACM's computing professionals face new challenges
Technologists can make a difference on so many critical fronts.
915072
Exploring auction databases through interactive visualization
We introduce AuctionExplorer, a suite of tools for exploring databases of online auctions. The suite combines tools for collecting, processing, and interactively exploring auction attributes (e.g., seller rating), and the bid history (price evolution represented as a time series). Part of AuctionExplorer's power comes from its coupling of the two information structures, thereby allowing exploration of relationships between them. Exploration can be directed by hypothesis testing or exploratory data analysis. We propose a process for visual data analysis and illustrate AuctionExplorer's operations with a dataset of eBay auctions. Insights may improve seller, bidder, auction house, and other vendors' understanding of the market, thereby assisting their decision making process. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
8937545
Universal usability
see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may…reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.
17906883
Representing Unevenly-Spaced Time Series Data for Visualization and Interactive Exploration
Visualizing time series is useful to support discovery of relations and patterns in financial, genomic, medical and other applications. Often, measurements are equally spaced over time. We discuss the challenges of unevenly-spaced time series and present fourrepresentationmethods: sampled events, aggregated sampled events, event index and interleaved event index. We developed these methods while studying eBay auction data with TimeSearcher. We describe the advantages, disadvantages, choices for algorithms and parameters, and compare the different methods for different tasks. Interaction issues such as screen resolution, response time for dynamic queries, and learnability are governed by these decisions.
6042127
Colour‐coded pixel‐based highly interactive Web mapping for georeferenced data exploration
This paper describes a pixel‐based technique that enables highly interactive Web choropleth maps for georeferenced data publishing and visual exploration. Instead of delivering geographic knowledge to the client in polygon‐based vector formats, we encode geographic object IDs and shape information into highly compact pixel images (decoding maps). This allows the combination of raster and vector characteristics while avoiding the problems in the currently existing pixel‐based (raster‐image‐based) or vector‐based techniques. Differing from traditional pixel‐based techniques that are static and allow very little user interaction, our pixel‐based technique allows varieties of sub‐second (less than 1 s) interface controls such as dynamic query, dynamic classification, geographic object data identification, user‐setting adjusting, as well as turning on/off layers, panning and zooming, with no or minimum server support. Compared with Web GIS techniques that use vector geographic data, our technique avoids transferring over the network large vector geographic data. It also avoids the non‐trivial client‐side computation to interpret the vector data and render the maps. Our technique features a short initial download time, near‐constant performance scalability for larger numbers of geographic objects, and download‐map‐segment‐only‐when‐necessary which potentially reduces the overall data transfer over the network. As a result, it accommodates general public users with slow modem network connections and low‐end machines, as well as users with fast T‐1 connections and fast machines. The client‐side (browser) is implemented as lightweight Java applets. YMap, an easy‐to‐use, user‐task‐oriented highly interactive mapping tool for visual georeferenced data exploration is implemented using this technique. The performance comparison of YMap to some other vector‐based Web GIS demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of this technique.
12355336
Direct annotation: a drag-and-drop strategy for labeling photos
Annotating photographs is such a time-consuming, tedious and error-prone data entry task that it discourages most owners of personal photo libraries. By allowing the user to drag labels, such as personal names, from a scrolling list and drop them onto a photo, we believe we can make the task faster, easier and more appealing. Since the names are entered in a database, searching for all photos of a friend or family member is dramatically simplified. We describe the user interface design and the database schema to support direct annotation, as implemented in our PhotoFinder prototype.
36247121
Navigating in hyperspace: designing a structure-based toolbox
26554081
Structural analysis of hypertexts: identifying hierarchies and useful metrics
Hypertext users often suffer from the “lost in hyperspace” problem: disorientation from too many jumps while traversing a complex network. One solution to this problem is improved authoring to create more comprehensible structures. This paper proposes several authoring tools, based on hypertext structure analysis.
In many hypertext systems authors are encouraged to create hierarchical structures, but when writing, the hierarchy is lost because of the inclusion of cross-reference links. The first part of this paper looks at ways of recovering lost hierarchies and finding new ones, offering authors different views of the same hypertext. The second part helps authors by identifying properties of the hypertext document. Multiple metrics are developed including compactness and stratum. Compactness indicates the intrinsic connectedness of the hypertext, and stratum reveals to what degree the hypertext is organized so that some nodes must be read before others.
Several existing hypertexts are used to illustrate the benefits of each technique. The collection of techniques provides a multifaceted view of the hypertext, which should allow authors to reduce undesired structural complexity and create documents that readers can traverse more easily.