Bringing Interactive Contextual Maps to Users for Information Retrieval

The growth of available online collections of documents comes with a growth in users' expectations for retrieval services. Contextual representations and interaction processes are becoming a real challenge to accurately navigate among large amounts of data. This paper presents an intuitive framework for the creation of multilevel interactive maps of multimedia content. Our framework allows the user to build interactive 2D representations of multimedia documents. The visualization is based on a graph layout and filtering and generates maps through document clustering. Users may interactively modify the map according to their criteria of interests, defining their own viewpoints on the collection. They can then dig or surf depending on the interaction mode they choose. Those functionalities allow them to navigate, browse, and analyze quickly and precisely sets of multimedia documents, allowing deep investigation of collections.