Visualization of Retrieved Documents using a Presentation Server

Abstract

In any search-based digital library (DL) systems dealing with a non-trivial number of documents, users are often required to go through a long list of short document descriptions in order to identify what they are looking for. To tackle the problem, a variety of document organization algorithms and/or visualization techniques have been used to guide users in selecting relevant documents. Since these techniques require heavy computations, however, we developed a presentation server designed to serve as an intermediary between retrieval servers and clients equipped with a visualization interface. In addition, we designed our own visual interface by which users can view a set of documents from different perspectives through layers of document maps. We finally ran experiments to show that the visual interface, in conjunction with the presentation server, indeed helps users in selecting relevant documents from the retrieval results.