DocuBurst: Visualizing Document Content using Language Structure

DocuBurst is the first visualization of document content that takes advantage of the human-created structure in lexical databases. We use an accepted design paradigm to generate visualizations that improve the usability and utility of WordNet as the backbone for document content visualization. A radial, space-filling layout of hyponymy (IS-A relation) is presented with interactive techniques of zoom, filter, and details-on-demand for the task of document visualization. The techniques can be generalized to multiple documents.

Check out the live demo here.

Media Coverage

• DocuBurst featured in Marti Hearst’s wonderful book, Search User Interfaces
• DocuBurst featured in the Toronto Star!
• DocuBurst on ‘information aesthetics’ blog
• Interview with Margaux Watt of CBC Radio One Manitoba’s “Up To Speed“, 21 Feb, 2008:
  
• A feature story on DocuBurst aired on FairChild TV “Media Focus” (cable 36 in Toronto), Friday, March 14, 2008!

Resources

• GitHub Repository (web)
• GitHub Repository (desktop)
• Eurovis presentation slides

Software

The code for displaying and interacting with radial, space-filling trees in prefuse is open source and is available for download. The code is distributed as a zip file and can be imported into Eclipse. It is dependent on the prefuse information visualization toolkit and, unfortunately, is minimally documented at this time:

• Radial Space Filling Trees in prefuse [.zip] (requires separate prefuse download) or
• Mavenized code, including pom, courtesy Brian O’Neill or
• Executable Jar with prefuse embedded [.jar]