Information Visualization Methods Research Articles

Integration of tools for binding archetypes to SNOMED CT

BackgroundThe Archetype formalism and the associated Archetype Definition Language have been proposed as an ISO standard for specifying models of components of electronic healthcare records as a means of achieving interoperability between clinical systems. This paper presents an archetype editor with support for manual or semi-automatic creation of bindings between archetypes and terminology systems.MethodsLexical and semantic methods are applied in order to obtain automatic mapping suggestions. Information visualisation methods are also used to assist the user in exploration and selection of mappings.ResultsAn integrated tool for archetype authoring, semi-automatic SNOMED CT terminology binding assistance and terminology visualization was created and released as open source.ConclusionFinding the right terms to bind is a difficult task but the effort to achieve terminology bindings may be reduced with the help of the described approach. The methods and tools presented are general, but here only bindings between SNOMED CT and archetypes based on the openEHR reference model are presented in detail.

A digital library for recovery, research, and learning from April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech.

The authors are developing a digital library to help during the long-term recovery from the mass shooting on April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech. Content comes from uploaded texts, images, videos, and other files, as well as pages crawled from the Web and information collected, with permission, from those working with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Flickr. The authors are applying data/text mining, social network analysis, and information visualization methods to facilitate systems science, providing key added-value services, especially to social and behavioral scientists seeking faster and easier ways to analyze, model, understand, and test hypotheses. The article also considers how technologies influence communications. The authors aim to support the university, local community, region, nation, and the world, as it seeks to learn from a tragic event. Language: en

Heuristic Search and Information Visualization Methods for School Redistricting

We describe an application of AI search and information visualization techniques to the problem of school redistricting, in which students are assigned to home schools within a county or school district. This is a multicriteria optimization problem in which competing objectives, such as school capacity, busing costs, and socioeconomic distribution, must be considered. Because of the complexity of the decision-making problem, tools are needed to help end users generate, evaluate, and compare alternative school assignment plans. A key goal of our research is to aid users in finding multiple qualitatively different redistricting plans that represent different trade-offs in the decision space. We present heuristic search methods that can be used to find a set of qualitatively different plans, and give empirical results of these search methods on population data from the school district of Howard County, Maryland. We show the resulting plans using novel visualization methods that we have developed for summarizing and comparing alternative plans.

Realization of Information Visualization of Electric Power Monitoring System for MV/LV Distribution Customers

Recently, switchboards for MV/LV distribution customers have been united and digitalized rapidly. This paper proposes the effective information visualization method for the data measured from cubicle switchboards for MV/LV distribution customers. We developed the algorithm that analyzes abundant data measured by switchboards and displays them to overall users, such as fire information index, power condition index, switchboard safety index, and power diminution index. Using a touch screen made users to operate it easily. User interface was also improved by taking graphic visualization. We guess the information visualization method suggested in this paper shows the new direction that heavy electrical equipments including switchboards are going to develop in the future.

Visual correlation of network alerts

The VisAlert visual correlation tool facilitates situational awareness in complex network environments by providing a holistic view of network security to help detect malicious activities. Information visualization techniques and methods in many applications have effectively increased operators' situational awareness, letting them more effectively detect, diagnose, and treat anomalous conditions. Visualization elevates information comprehension by fostering rapid correlation and perceived associations. Our visualization technique integrates the information in log and alert files into an intuitive, flexible, extensible, and scalable visualization tool - VisAlert - that presents critical information concerning network activity in an integrated manner, increasing the user's situational awareness.

Web information visualization method employing immune network model for finding topic stream from document-set sequence

A Web information visualization method based on the document set-wise processing is proposed to find the topic stream from a sequence of document sets. Although the hugeness as well as its dynamic nature of the Web is burden for the users, it will also bring them a chance for business and research if they can notice the trends or movement of the real world from the Web. A sequence of document sets found on the Web, such as online news article sets is focused on in this paper. The proposed method employs the immune network model, in which the property of memory cell is used to find the topical relation among document sets. After several types of memory cell models are proposed and evaluated, the experimental results show that the proposed method with memory cell can find more topic streams than that without memory cell.

Application of Information Visualization Principles at Various Stages of System Development

Designing and developing effective information visualizations requires a systematic approach. This Practitioner Paper identifies how innovative information visualizations can be integrated into standard systems development processes. While information visualizations already exist for the design of user interfaces, new methods frequently offer further improvement in information displays. Designers should consider incorporating these advancements wherever possible. The Systems Development Process provides the structure necessary to integrate new information visualizations throughout the design process. This paper describes specific examples whereby innovative information visualization methods were integrated into a USAF R&D design effort during several phases of its development. Information visualization methods include use of micro/macro salience displays, visual language, and axiomatic designs. This approach not only improved the quality of the user displays through advancing information visualization techniques, it also minimized design modifications through use of the system development processes.

Radical SAM, a novel protein superfamily linking unresolved steps in familiar biosynthetic pathways with radical mechanisms: functional characterization using new analysis and information visualization methods.

A novel protein superfamily with over 600 members was discovered by iterative profile searches and analyzed with powerful bioinformatics and information visualization methods. Evidence exists that these proteins generate a radical species by reductive cleavage of S:-adenosylmethionine (SAM) through an unusual Fe-S center. The superfamily (named here Radical SAM) provides evidence that radical-based catalysis is important in a number of previously well- studied but unresolved biochemical pathways and reflects an ancient conserved mechanistic approach to difficult chemistries. Radical SAM proteins catalyze diverse reactions, including unusual methylations, isomerization, sulfur insertion, ring formation, anaerobic oxidation and protein radical formation. They function in DNA precursor, vitamin, cofactor, antibiotic and herbicide biosynthesis and in biodegradation pathways. One eukaryotic member is interferon-inducible and is considered a candidate drug target for osteoporosis; another is observed to bind the neuronal Cdk5 activator protein. Five defining members not previously recognized as homologs are lysine 2,3-aminomutase, biotin synthase, lipoic acid synthase and the activating enzymes for pyruvate formate-lyase and anaerobic ribonucleotide reductase. Two functional predictions for unknown proteins are made based on integrating other data types such as motif, domain, operon and biochemical pathway into an organized view of similarity relationships.