Topology-Based Visual Analysis of Information Spaces II

Modern internet technology provides fast access to an increasing amount of text documents for everyone, everywhere, at any time. This development challenges information processing of researchers, businesses, and general public. Without effective means for human access to large document collections, our society can not meet this challenge and use the chance to increase knowledge production and create deeper understanding. This project will provide efficient, scalable access to large, dynamic electronic document collections. We focus on visual analysis of topic evolution to derive a visual overview of content together with interactive and intuitive filtering mechanisms. This endeavor requires a joint effort of natural language processing and visualization research. We will extend our successful topological approach of the first project phase to temporally ordered, expanding document collections. The final user interface will represent the documents as three-dimensional terrain in which hills describe topics.