Topology-Based Visual Analysis of Information Spaces

Collections of text documents belong to the most important sources of information for the researchers, company employees, and anyone else. Therefore an efficient access to large electronic document collections provides a major challenge to science and the entire society. The development of scalable methods for such access needs a joint effort of information retrieval, visualization and human computer interface technology. This goal is one of the central aspects of the new discipline called visual analytics. This project proposal uses the mathematical concept of topology to unify different approaches to the analysis and visualization of such document collections. While the presentation of query results has reached a good standard in modern interfaces, the project wants to create a framework for efficient browsing and concept analysis to provide effective means for the interactive exploration of large document collections. This entails substantial work on scalable analysis and new interactive visualizations which will be developed in the project.