Visualisation of massive retrieved newsfeeds in interactive 3D

This report describes work carried out under the Automatic Information Retrieval project at DERA, in building a 4D landscape (a TextScape) which acts as a graphical user interface (GUI) to the DERA-OKAPI search engine. Traditionally search engines present a 2D visual interface (usually a windows-icons-menus-pointer (WIMP) interface) to the user. Key words are entered and the 'hits' are displayed usually in a list form. Unfortunately, the number of documents retrieved is often overwhelming and a significant amount of time is still required to read abstracts and sections of documents in order to determine if they are relevant, even after the search engine has performed relevance ranking. The challenge is how to improve on this. We propose to render the information most immediately required onto the visual attributes of a 3D landscape. Shape, colour and size can then project the information that is sought, and mining the object hierarchy visually returns information more rapidly.