Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Jigsaw: supporting investigative analysis through interactive visualization

The number of documents and the number of concepts and entities within the documents are growing larger. sense-making processes become more and more difficult for the analysts.

"Jigsaw mainly represents documents and their entities visually in order to help analysts examine them more efficiently and develop theories about potential actions more quickly".

Jigsaw presents information about documents and entities through multiple distinct visualizations, called views. Each view provides something unique to the user(analysts mainly) to get a different perspective. There are several views :

1) List View
2) Graph View
3) Scatter Plot View
4) Document view
5) Calendar view
6) Document Cluster view
7) Shoebox

The docment view is more like ibm many eyes or somewhat similar to tag cloud. Highlighting the word with a color and also using size to represent. Document cluster view is also interesting with rectangular shapes and giving user some control.

One of the applications that they talk about is using Jigsaw to explore
online articles such as web news reports or blogs on topics like political debates. They user could build a set of loosely related documents about a particular topic or person and then use Jigsaw to find connections etween entities among the documents. This can be really helpful.

In a way it is really good to have different views which user can choose but again also make it difficult to choose the appropriate one each time.

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