Well-formed data » Thesis

I’m in yr bookz…

Moritz Stefaner — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:24:39 +0000

… visualizing your tags :)

The “Tagging” book by Gene Smith is out. I am still awaiting a paper copy, but had a chance to look at the online version already. It looks really comprehensive, concise and covering all important tagging concepts. Which is not easy for such a moving target topic.

Besides, my elastic tag maps visualization is featured on p.102f. Nice!

FIND’08: 2nd international workshop on Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search

Moritz Stefaner — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:49:33 +0000

I would like to make you aware of the workshop of interest for anybody into faceted search and related topics:

FIND ’08: 2nd international workshop on Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search

Torino, Italy, September 1–5, 2008 (in conjunction with DEXA 2008)

Important Dates:

Submission of papers: 15 March 2008 Notification of acceptance: 20 April 2008 Camera-ready copies: 15 May 2008

http://www.sig-find.org/find08/index.html

Workshop description

Current search paradigms for the web, direct access via search engines and navigational access via static taxonomies, have recently been strongly criticized. A third approach, dynamic taxonomies or facetedsearch, focuses on user-centered conceptual exploration and is finally gaining acceptance to the extent that it is now the de facto standard in product selection for e-commerce.

Dynamic taxonomies work on multidimensional taxonomies (usually organized by facets) and provide a single, coherent visual framework in which users can focus on one or more concepts in the taxonomy, and immediately see a conceptual summary of their focus, in the form of a reduced taxonomy derived from the original one by pruning unrelated concepts. Concepts in the reduced taxonomy can be used to set additional, dependent foci and users iterate in a guided yet unconstrained way until they reach a result set sufficiently small for manual inspection.

The access paradigm supported is aconceptual exploration, far more frequent in “search” tasks than the retrieval by exact specification supported by search engines and database queries. The underlying model is simple and easily understood by users, offers substantial benefits over traditional approaches and has an extremely wide application range and a potential for important extensions. This 1-day workshop will discuss all aspects of dynamic taxonomies and faceted search, from underlying technology to user interfaces and commercial use, including demo systems and applications.

Topics of Interest:

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following areas: • Multidimensional/faceted taxonomy design • Automatic or semiautomatic multidimensional/faceted taxonomy creation from meta-data, from structured and unstructured documents or by social tagging • Extensions of dynamic taxonomies • Efficient and scalable indexing and retrieval • User interface issues • Emerging applications • Evaluation approaches and metrics

Hand in your papers!

The Language of Graphics

Moritz Stefaner — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:21:38 +0000

I read into Yuri Engelhardt’s dissertation “The Language of Graphics”, and I think it is a fantastic piece of work. As the title suggests, the thesis suggests a linguistically motivated approach to the analysis of graphics: based from a syntactical analysis of space, objects and their relations, Engelhardt classifies and exemplifies different types of syntactic structures in which graphical objects can be arranged in order to convey meaning. A great achievement is the comparison and “translation” of numerous, discipline specific approaches in this area, ranging from Tufte, Bertin, Card, over MacEachren to even Lakoff. Besides, I especially enjoyed his discussion of syntactic roles: Analogously to the different syntactic roles verbs can have in a sentence, the same visual elements can trigger different semantics or have different degrees of freedom according to their syntatic role in a graphical representation. Good examples are map markers, labels, containers, separators etc. Again, this part is analytically really strong and I believe also quite novel in this form. The thesis closes with a discussion of interpretation and semantics, and a resulting classification of graphic representations. But I haven’t gotten this far yet.

Again, I find it a great work, and it reminds me a lot of my Cognitive Science days :)

Here are some pictures from the thesis to give you an impression:

Best Masters Thesis

Moritz Stefaner — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:47:04 +0000

My thesis was awarded a price for the best Masters Thesis at our university. Although the competition was not that large, I am proud nevertheless. I should be pretty much unstoppable now :)

FIND07 workshop

Moritz Stefaner — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:08:18 +0000

Much too late, but better than never: I attended the lovely FIND07 workshop in Regensburg, presenting my work on the Elastic Lists. In the beginning, I felt a bit weird at the conference, being the only designer in sight, but the workshop itself was pretty inspiring and maybe also fruitful for the future.

So special thanks and greetings to

Giovanni M. Sacco for the pioneering work, and the kind organization and introduction to the workshop
Sébastien Ferré for reminding me of formal concept analysis again, and the very interesting Camelis tool
Yannis Tzitzikas for the very interesting talk and the “negotiation approach” to taxonomy mapping — check You Say… We Say…

You can find my slides here. The change blindness video was copied from here.

Happiness is…

Moritz Stefaner — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 23:07:59 +0000

On August 1st, a new earthling entered the scene. Sina and I are happy, tired, and –happy.

Thesis presentation

Moritz Stefaner — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:06:02 +0000

I will present my Thesis on Tuesday, 17.07.2007, 10.30am at FH Potsdam, Pappelallee 8–9, Building 5, Room 2.13.

Everybody’s invited to come!

Visual tools for the socio–semantic web

Moritz Stefaner — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:26:26 +0000

Yes, it’s done.

Find the pdf here and an overview of the experiments and visualizations here and me in the sun :)

Check back, there might be more updates (especially for Konduit) over the next couple of weeks, as I am preparing my final presentation.

And other than that, this blog will, of course, go on, with more visualization and interaction pieces, critiques and discoveries.

Weinberger at the Well

Moritz Stefaner — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:23:41 +0000

There is an interesting discussion with David Weinberger (author of “Everything is miscellaneous”) going on at the Well about folksonomies and metadata.

Tag maps update again

Moritz Stefaner — Mon, 28 May 2007 20:58:47 +0000

> Tag maps v5

PS: 12 days to go, wish me luck!