Enhanced navigation and focus on TileBars with barycenter heuristic-based reordering

Abstract

The classic TileBars paradigm has been used to show distribution information of query terms in full-text documents. However, when used to show the distribution of a large number of entities of interest to users within a document, it hinders users' quick comprehension due to the inherent visual complexity problem. In this paper, we present a novel approach to improve the visual presentation of TileBars, in which barycenter heuristic for bigraph crossing minimization is used to reorder TileBars' elements. The reordered TileBars enables users to quickly and easily identify which entities appear in the beginning, end, or throughout a document. A user study has shown that the reordered TileBars can provide users with better focus and navigation while exploring text documents. Copyright 2010 ACM.