document visualization

The goal of document visualization is to display documents and document collections so that it is easy to quickly find relevant information. To achieve this, document visualization uses methods that use the capabilities of the human visual system to rapidly absorb and understand information.

Document visualization can help a user to quickly understand what a document is about and where its important passages are. This is particularly useful for long documents. Document visualization also illustrates relations between documents (e.g. how documents cite each other; documents with common topics; documents written by the same authors or at the same place or time). Furthermore, document visualization can help analyze temporal patterns in document collections (e.g. when coverage of certain topics in- or decreases).

Here we briefly illustrate some methods for document visualization. All these methods are active areas of research and development at FW Consulting.