Three-dimensional display of document set

• US 6,298,174 B1
• Filed: 10/15/1999
• Issued: 10/02/2001
• Est. Priority Date: 08/12/1996
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Battelle Memorial Institute
• Original Assignee: Battelle Memorial Institute
• Inventors: Schur, Anne, Thomas, James J., Pottier, Marc C., Lantrip, David B., Pennock, Kelly A., Wise, James A.
• Primary Examiner(s): Couso, Jose L.
• Assistant Examiner(s): Dang, Duy M.
• Application Number:
  US09/419,724
• Time in Patent Office: 718 Days
• Field of Search: 382/306, 382/305, 382/309, 382/307, 382/185, 707/530, 707/531-538, 707/2-6, 707/1, 707/102, 707/100, 358/403
• US Class Current: 382/305
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/34 Browsing; Visualisation therefor
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 18/23 Clustering techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 18/40 Software arrangements specially adapted for pattern recognition, e.g. user interfaces or toolboxes therefor
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99931 Database or file accessing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99932 Access augmentation or optimizing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99935 Query augmenting and refining, e.g. inexact access
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99936 Pattern matching access

Abstract

A method for spatializing text content for enhanced visual browsing and analysis. The invention is applied to large text document corpora such as digital libraries, regulations and procedures, archived reports, and the like. The text content from these sources may be transformed to a spatial representation that preserves informational characteristics from the documents. The three-dimensional representation may then be visually browsed and analyzed in ways that avoid language processing and that reduce the analysts'"'"' effort.

Claims

1. A method of determining and displaying the relative content and context of a number of documents in a large document set, wherein the relationships of a plurality of documents are presented in a three-dimensional landscape with the relative size and height of a peak in the three-dimensional landscape representing the relative significance of the relationship of a topic attribute and the individual documents in the document set, comprising the steps of:

(a) building an electronic database of a plurality of documents;

(b) creating a plurality of high dimensional vectors, one for each of said plurality of documents such that each of said high dimensional vectors represents the relative relationship of the individual documents to the topic attribute;

(c) arranging said high dimensional vectors into clusters, each of said clusters representing a plurality of documents grouped by the relative significance of their relationship to a topic attribute;

(d) calculating centroid coordinates as the center of mass of each cluster, the centroid coordinates being stored or projected in a two-dimensional plane;

(e) constructing a vector for each document, said vector containing the distance from the document to each centroid coordinate in high-dimensional space;

(f) creating a plurality of term layers, each of said term layers corresponding to a descriptive term applied to each cluster, and identifying x,y coordinates for each document associated with each term layer; and

(g) creating a z coordinate associated with each term layer for each x,y coordinate by applying a smoothing function to the x,y coordinates for each document, and superimposing upon one another all of said term layers.