From Graph Drawing to Tag-Cloud drawing?
Tag clouds are an interesting visualization technique because, unlike bar charts, you can easily display 30 or 50 weights in a compact figure. Moreover, because they are a 2D structure, you can more easily cluster similar tags together. The Tag-Cloud Drawing problem is the optimization of the layout of the tag clouds. It is somewhat related to the Graph Drawing problem.
Recently, Fujimura et al. showed how to scale tag clouds further… up to 5,000 attributes!
We use a topographical image that helps users to grasp the relationship among tags intuitively as a background to the tag clouds. We apply this interface to a blog navigation system and show that the proposed method enables users to find the desired tags easily even if the tag clouds are very large, 5,000 and above tags. Our approach is also effective for understanding the overall structure of a large amount of tagged documents.
I really think that tag-cloud drawing is a topic deserving of more attention. It is both a fun and practical problem.
Well, some references to Kohonen’s SOM or MDS would not hurt Fujimura’s paper.
Another thing is, of course, whether this “Topigraphy” can be called a tag cloud any more.
http://archive.ast.cam.ac.uk/vizier/kohonen.htx
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~kristof/research/papers/phd/2003/image035.jpg
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/misc/koh-screen1.gif
Comment by Innar Liiv — 10/6/2008 @ 14:38
Ooh, graph drawing. It’s been a while, but I did work on this stuff once upon a time. Feel free to lift ideas or source code from my home page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quixote/#Graph%20Layout
Comment by Daniel Tunkelang — 11/6/2008 @ 12:19