Citiviz: A visual user interface to the CITIDEL system

Abstract

The Digital Library (DL) field is one of the most promising areas of application for information visualization technology. In this paper, we propose a visual user interface tool kit for digital libraries, to deliver an overview of document sets, with support for interactive direct manipulation. Our system, Citiviz, employs a dynamic hyperbolic tree to display hierarchical relationships among documents, based on where their topics fit into the ACM classification system. Also, Citiviz provides an interactive, animated 2-dimensional scatter plot. With it, users may gain insight by changing various parameters, or may directly jump to a particular document based on its label or location. According to a preliminary evaluation, our system shows advantages in performance and user preference relative to traditional text based DL web interfaces. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.