Omar Alonso and Ricardo Baeza-Yates alonso@nova1.cs.vt.edu
We use a library or bookpile metaphor to visualize documents depending if the tool is used horizontally or vertically. The pile metaphor has been used before, but as an icon for documents. Each document (seen like a book) is represented as a rectangle with a particular color, height, width and position into the set. Each one of this graphical attributes, including the order of the list, can be mapped to a document attribute (occurrence density, size, date, etc). In the example, the order is mapped to ranking, number of hits to color, width to size and height to the age of a document. These user selected mappings allow to study different correlations of attributes on the document set, helping the user to select the desired documents.