Method and apparatus for dynamic information visualization

• US 8,683,389 B1
• Filed: 09/08/2010
• Issued: 03/25/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 09/08/2010
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: The New England Complex Systems Institute Incorporated
• Original Assignee: The New England Complex Systems Institute Incorporated
• Inventors: Bar-Yam, Yaneer, Harmon, Dion, Virdee, Kawandeep, Misra, Vedant, Lagi, Marco
• Primary Examiner(s): Pham, Linh K
• Application Number:
  US12/877,697
• Time in Patent Office: 1,294 Days
• Field of Search: 715/853, 715/712, 715/713, 707/737, 707/798
• US Class Current: 715/853
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2264 Multidimensional index structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0481 based on specific properties of the displayed interaction object or a metaphor-based environment, e.g. interaction with desktop elements like windows or icons, or assisted by a cursor's changing behaviour or appearance

Abstract

A method for organizing, visualizing, and navigating data objects within a dataset is presented, including network visualization alongside a detailed information display. The method includes interactivity with the visualization through network panning, zooming, and node clicking. The network nodes represent the data objects. Node proximity and links represent similarity or other relatedness measures between respective data objects. The network can be displayed in full to illustrate large scale properties. Clicking the nodes provides further data object information of the highlighted node, which is displayed alongside the network.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for organizing and displaying a plurality of data objects including information on a display screen, the method comprising:

organizing the plurality of data objects according to at least one relatedness measure between respective pairs of the plurality of data objects;

displaying on a first portion of the display screen, the plurality of data objects as a network display, the network display including interactive markers corresponding to the plurality of data objects;

displaying on the first portion of the display screen an indication of a source of a selected data object in response to querying a corresponding interactive marker;

highlighting a subset of the plurality of data objects in response to a first selection of an interactive marker representing at least one of the plurality of data objects;

displaying simultaneously, on a second portion of the display screen, a subset of information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects and indicia relating the information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects to corresponding interactive markers;

highlighting and displaying a second subset of the information included in at least one data object in a second subset of the plurality of data objects in response to a second selection of a second interactive marker representing a different one of the plurality of data objects;

constructing feature vectors from the plurality of data objects;

creating a proximity metric from the feature vectors;

clustering the data objects by projecting the data base and proximities onto a network using multivariate statistical techniques such that similar objects are in closer proximity than dissimilar objects;

mapping clustered data objects onto a lower dimensional shape; and

wherein the data objects are split to any scale of sub objects for which feature vectors are created, and wherein scale refers to the size of components of the data objects.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising displaying additional information about a relationship between a selected pair of nodes in response to a user selection of a corresponding link between the selected pair of nodes.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein a proximity of a pair of interactive markers on the display screen is a function of a similarity between the corresponding pair of data objects.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the relatedness measure comprises a plurality of links between data objects according to a network description.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the data objects comprise at least one of

text data;

multimedia data;

image data; and

audio data.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein data objects are text data documents and the network is a document network.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the selected subset of the plurality of data objects in response to the first selection of an interactive marker includes a predetermined number of closest neighbors to the first selection of the interactive marker representing the at least one of the plurality of data objects.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the subset of information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects in the second portion of the display screen includes a title of one of the selected subset of the plurality of data objects in response to the first selection of an interactive marker.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein organizing the plurality of data objects comprises:

identifying links between the data objects; and

mapping data objects onto a lower dimensional shape using multivariate statistical techniques such that similar objects are in closer proximity than dissimilar objects.

10. The method of claim 1 wherein the metric and features vectors are determined from crowd sourced data wherein crowd sourced data refers to information obtained from groups of individuals to be analyzed for purposes of creating the network.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein displaying the plurality of data objects as a network display further comprises dynamically updating the network display in response an underlying change in the plurality of data objects.

12. The method of claim 1 further comprising selecting at least one data object by specifying a term in a search term query.

13. The method of claim 1 wherein the metric and features vectors are determined from a term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) calculation.

14. The method of claim 1 further comprising highlighting nodes and neighboring nodes corresponding to the plurality of data objects which form a network cluster, wherein a subset of closely related data objects are represented by a first plurality of interactive markers corresponding to the subset of information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects in the second portion of the display screen and a different subset of more closely related data objects are represented by a second plurality of interactive markers corresponding to a second plurality of a different subset of information included in at least one data object in a different subset of the plurality of data objects in the second portion of the display screen having a higher relevance score than a first subset of closely related data objects.

15. The method of claim 1 further comprising displaying dynamical movement of the network in response to receiving an indication of a user simulating pulling on a node.

16. A non-transitory computer readable storage device having computer readable code thereon for organizing and displaying a plurality of data objects including information on a display screen, the non-transitory computer readable storage device including instructions in which a computer system performs operations comprising:

organizing the plurality of data objects according to at least one relatedness measure between respective pairs of the plurality of data objects;

displaying on a first portion of the display screen, the plurality of data objects as a network display, the network display including interactive markers corresponding to the plurality of data objects;

displaying on the first portion of the display screen an indication of source of a selected data object in response to querying a corresponding interactive marker;

highlighting a subset of the plurality of data objects in response to a first selection of an interactive marker representing at least one of the plurality of data objects;

displaying simultaneously, on a second portion of the display screen, a subset of information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects and indicia relating the subset of information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects to corresponding interactive markers;

highlighting and displaying a second subset of the information included in at least one data object in a second subset of the plurality of data objects in response to a second selection of a second interactive marker representing a different one of the plurality of data objects;

constructing feature vectors from the plurality of data objects;

creating a proximity metric from the feature vectors;

clustering the data objects by projecting the data base and proximities onto a network using multivariate statistical techniques such that similar objects are in closer proximity than dissimilar object; and

mapping clustered data objects onto a lower dimensional shape; and

wherein the data objects are split to any scale of sub objects for which feature vectors are created, and wherein scale refers to the size of components of the data objects.

17. The non-transitory computer readable storage device of claim 16 further comprising instructions for performing operations comprising displaying a plurality of links connecting pairs of the interactive markers, each link indicating the organization of the plurality of data objects and relationships between pairs of the plurality of data objects.

18. A computer-implemented method for organizing and displaying a plurality of data objects including information on a display screen, the method comprising:

organizing the plurality of data objects according to at least one relatedness measure between respective pairs of the plurality of data objects;

displaying on a first portion of the display screen, the plurality of data objects as a network display, the network display including interactive markers corresponding to the plurality of data objects;

displaying on the first portion of the display screen an indication of a source of a selected data object in response to querying a corresponding interactive marker;

highlighting a subset of the plurality of data objects in response to a first selection of an interactive marker representing at least one of the plurality of data objects;

displaying simultaneously, on a second portion of the display screen, a subset of information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects and indicia relating the information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects to corresponding interactive markers;

highlighting and displaying a second subset of the information included in at least one data object in a second subset of the plurality of data objects in response to a second selection of a second interactive marker representing a different one of the plurality of data objects;

displaying a plurality of links connecting pairs of the interactive markers, each link indicating an organization of the plurality of data objects and relationships between pairs of the plurality of data objects;

wherein displaying links further comprises displaying links as a function of a predetermined threshold of an organizational metric;

wherein the relatedness measure is similarity between the respective pairs of the plurality of data objects; and

wherein the network has an adjustable threshold to display links when a degree of similarity is greater than a predetermined threshold.

19. The method of claim 18 further comprising displaying dynamical movement of the network in response to receiving an indication of a user simulating pulling on a node.

20. The method of claim 18 further comprising displaying additional information about a relationship between a selected pair of nodes in response to a user selection of a corresponding link between the selected pair of nodes.

21. The method of claim 18, wherein the relatedness measure comprises a plurality of links between data objects according to a network description.

22. The method of claim 18, wherein the data objects comprise at least one of

text data;

multimedia data;

image data; and

audio data.

23. The method of claim 18, wherein data objects are text data documents and the network is a document network.

24. The method of claim 18, wherein the selected subset of the plurality of data objects in response to the first selection of an interactive marker includes a predetermined number of closest neighbors to the first selection of the interactive marker representing the at least one of the plurality of data objects.

25. The method of claim 18, wherein the subset of information included in at least one data object in the subset of the plurality of data objects in the second portion of the display screen includes a title of one of the selected subset of the plurality of data objects in response to the first selection of an interactive marker.

26. The method of claim 18, wherein displaying the plurality of data objects as a network display further comprises dynamically updating the network display in response an underlying change in the plurality of data objects.

27. The method of claim 18 further comprising selecting at least one data object by specifying a term in a search term query.

28. The method of claim 18 further comprising displaying dynamical movement of the network in response to receiving an indication of a user simulating pulling on a node.