July, 7, 2015 Seminar Feature Based Search

Visual-Interactive Search and Exploration in Complex Data Repositories
– Feature-Based Search, Applications and Research Challenges

Lecturer: Tobias SCHRECK, University of Konstanz and Graz University of Technology <link>

Abstract: Advances in data acquisition and storage technology are leading to the creation of large, complex data sets in many different domains including science, engineering or social media. Often, this data is of non-textual / non-spatial nature. Important user tasks for leveraging large complex data sets include retrieval of relevant information, exploration for patterns and insights, and re-using data for authoring purposes. User-oriented, effective and scalable approaches are needed to support these tasks. Visual-interactive techniques in combination with automatic data analysis approaches can provide effective user interfaces for handling large, complex data sets, and help users to factor in background knowledge for solving search and analysis tasks. We will discuss approaches for visual-interactive, content-based search and analysis tasks in time-oriented and multivariate data sets, with applications in Digital Data Libraries. We will discuss how sketch-and example-based search interfaces allow to effectively formulate user queries, and how appropriate similarity functions for these data types can be defined and evaluated. We will also discuss approaches for visual-interactive search in 3D model repositories. Furthermore, we will present approaches for the repair of 3D models of deteriorated Cultural Heritage objects, relying on appropriate feature-based 3D similarity functions. We conclude this talk with a discussion of interesting research challenges at the intersection of visual data analysis, novel non-textual data types, and applications in Digital Libraries.