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For those who have upgraded to Windows 8, here’s a beguiling project featured during TechFest 2013. Called Making Smooth Topical Connections on Touch Devices, it offers an alternate, graphical way to mine, browse, and search through a database.
The documents within the database are represented as a grid of keywords, with the font sizes varying by the frequency in which the words appear. This creates a galaxy-like collection of word groups interrelated with others nearby. The result is that the more popular terms in the database are easily identifiable because of font size, and related terms are identifiable by proximity. At a glance, you can see what’s important and what is connected.
For a glimpse at the project in action, just take a look at the TechFest 2013 home page.
“This makes it much easier to find things of interest,” says Nebojsa Jojic, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, “as opposed to search terms. You can see smooth transitions between words, and you can immediately see terms that are related to your search.”
