Visual elements in search and information retrieval systems = Elementos visuales en sistemas de búsqueda y recuperación de información

Abstract

Using this mantra Ben Shneiderman prophesises in many of his articles and conferences what the next generation of data recovery interfaces will be like : a general vision first , followed by a closer approach and a filter, and finally details about the part of interest . Shneiderman thus synthesises four stages of the process of information search, and to each of these he adds a visual component. The user comes to the system and sees the overall information he can find there, what subjects are contained within, and how it works. Once viewed in a general way, the user zooms in, that is to say, he centres in on one part that is of major interest. In order to refine his search better, he applies a filter, so that the results obtained better match his information needs. To end the process, the user asks for more detail from some of the results in order to determine if it will be of interest. The mantra refers to "animated GUIs and visual data mining tools", and we will emphasise the visual in the rest of this article. The area of information visualization attempts to offer visual representations that communicate information in a speedy and effective way. Diverse techniques have been developed to achieve this objective and to make the process of data recovery a more comprehensible job and on occasions, more interactive. We present the most used of these: use of icons to represent concepts use of colours and textures to highlight or differentiate elements graphics with hierarchical presentations that are easy on the eye maps that present information arranged according to similitude, using grouping techniques zoom effects to show detailed information animation and perspective in three dimensions Visualization when applied to information helps people form a mental image of the information space. If the visualization takes place in an interface whose objective is information rettrieval, the expression used for this type of system is Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces (VIRIs). The four processes named previously are susceptible to being presented through visual components. In fact, in the sections that follow we are going to see some systems of information presentation - mainly projects that have not been commercially implemented - that will serve as examples tshowing these elements of visualization. They have been classified into three groups: overall vision of the collection, visualization of results, and visualization of the attributes of each document. What remains is to tackle the final phase of the process of search and recovery of information, that which links the moment of presentation of results obtained by the system with the query. This deals with the reformulation of the query, which at the present time does not use visualization, for which reason this item will not be dealt with.