Visual information search based on knowledge schema modeling

This paper suggests a new interactive system based on visualization of the user's knowledge schema to aid the process of information search and knowledge discovery. The system, inspired from the human memory model, constructs an external representation of the user's conceptual knowledge structure from the user's existing information such as the folder structure and associated tags. In contrast to existing systems based on user models, the system allows users to specify their information needs by selecting a part of their knowledge schema, understand their search results in the context of their existing knowledge organization, and store new information based on their knowledge schema. Through a preliminary evaluation, we show that the visualization of the extracted knowledge structure and the presented relevance of new information was perceived to be useful, even with a basic model of text processing. The participants were able to search for relevant information effectively and expand their information collection with consistency.