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XML and Information Visualization
Paper, was published by Bénédicte Le Grand and Michel Soto at 1999-12-09
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Complex information systems are very difficult to represent and users often have problems to find relevant information; this is the case with Web navigation: users feel “lost”. Data contained in such systems can often be organized hierarchically, thus it is possible to represent it as a tree. However, most visualizations are cluttered because of the amount of information to display. We propose to solve these problems by using Virtual Reality (VR) techniques. After reviewing different 3D visualization methods, we decided to use cone trees. Unfortunately, the enhancement provided by graphic methods is not sufficient when hierarchies are very large; in such cases, trees must be pruned thanks to filtering methods. We chose to structure and manipulate data with the eXtensible Markup Language [XML]. XML allows the description and organization of any type of information. In this paper, we show how we implemented these principles in the field of network management (for networks based on Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) equipment). The application we developed eases navigation in data extracted from the Management Information Base (MIB) and accelerates access to useful information. In the future, we will apply these results to Web navigation.
Authors
This publication is cited in the following publication
As a former information scientist, I am fascinated since 1999 by the capabilities for building Topic Maps-based knowledge systems having the potential to augment human mind. One can model arbitrary knowledge organization systems, deal with semantic heterogeneity, collocate all facts about one subject in one logical place, and with TMQL have semantic retrieval on federated semantic networks. Therefore I expect bright prospects for business concepts building on the exchange of such knowledge snippets via semantic knowledge services.