Conceptscope: Organizing and visualizing knowledge in documents based on domain ontology

Abstract

Current text visualization techniques typically provide overviews of document content and structure using intrinsic properties such as term frequencies, co-occurrences, and sentence structures. Such visualizations lack conceptual overviews incorporating domain-relevant knowledge, needed when examining documents such as research articles or technical reports. To address this shortcom-ing, we present ConceptScope, a technique that utilizes a domain ontology to represent the conceptual relationships in a document in the form of a Bubble Treemap visualization. Multiple coordi-nated views of document structure and concept hierarchy with text overviews further aid document analysis. ConceptScope facilitates exploration and comparison of single and multiple documents re-spectively. We demonstrate ConceptScope by visualizing research articles and transcripts of technical presentations in computer sci-ence. In a comparative study with DocuBurst, a popular document visualization tool, ConceptScope was found to be more informative in exploring and comparing domain-specifc documents, but less so when it came to documents that spanned multiple disciplines.