Supervision : Jean-Gabriel GANASCIA

Memory Island: Visualizing Hierarchical Knowledge as Insightful Islands

This thesis is devoted to the study of an original cartographic visualization approach named Memory Island. We discuss how hierarchical knowledge can be meaningfully mapped and visualized as an insightful island. Our technique is inspired by the "loci" (plural of Latin "locus" for places or locations) method of the ancient "Art of Memory" technique. A well-designed map in mind can make sense of knowledge, which leads to the accomplishment of one's information seeking tasks, and helps to extend one's knowledge. To this end, Memory Island technique consists of associating each entity of knowledge to a designated area on a created virtual island. With the geographic visual metaphors we define, Memory Island can present phenomena found in knowledge, which is often difficult to understand.
In this thesis, we discuss how we design our visualization technique to make it achieve the great features of visualization: automatically generate a truthful, functional, beautiful, insightful, and enlightening island with its technical details. In order to make Memory Island more convenient for its users, we present our "overview+detail" interface, to support them with visual exploration and knowledge analysis. We also demonstrate how to create knowledge maps using Memory Island technique, by giving some example on different datasets of Digital Humanities (Project OBVIL), e-books (Project LOCUPLETO) and other domains.
Then, we propose our validation and evaluation protocols with two preliminary user experiments. The results from these studies indicate that the use of Memory Island provides advantages for non-experienced users tackling realistic browsing, helps them improve their performances in knowledge navigation and memorization tasks, and that most of them choose to use it for navigation and knowledge discovery.
We end up by concluding our researches and listing some perspectives and future works that can be based on our Memory Island technique.

2013-2017 Publications

• 2017
  • H. Fadili, Ch. Jouis, J.‑G. Ganascia, I. Atanassova, B. Yang, M. Bertin : “Contextual Exploration (EC3): a strategy for the detection, extraction and visualization of target data”, 4^th International Conference on Big Data Analysis and Data Mining, vol. 6 (5), Journal of Computer Engineering & Information Technology, Paris, France, pp. 67 (2017)
  • Ch. Jouis, H. Fadili, J.‑G. Ganascia, B. Yang, M. Bertin : “Exploration Contextuelle (EC3) : une stratégie de détection, d’extraction et de visualisation des données cibles”, Traitement de l’information multimodale (TIM), Paris, France (2017)
  • Ch. Jouis, H. Fadili, J.‑G. Ganascia, B. Yang, M. Bertin, I. Atanassova : “EC3 : Un démonstrateur fondé sur l’Exploration Contextuelle des données Textuelles pour la détection et la visualisation des informations cibles”, Big Data Mining and Visualization, Lille, France (2017)
• 2016
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Creating knowledge maps using Memory Island”, International Journal on Digital Libraries, (Springer Verlag) (2016)
  • A. Abi Haidar, B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Visualizing the First World War Using StreamGraphs and Information Extraction”, 20^th International Conference Information Visualisation, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 290-293, (IEEE) (2016)
  • B. Yang, Ch. Mainardi, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Browsing, Sharing, Learning and Reviewing the Haine du théâtre Corpus through Insightful Island”, Digital Humanities 2016, Krakow, Poland (2016)
  • B. Yang, Ch. Mainardi, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Apprentissage et le partage des connaissances humaines avec l’île de mémoire”, Atelier Visualisation d'informations, interaction et fouille de donnees dans la conference Extraction et Gestion de Connaissances (EGC'2016), Acte de l'Atelier Visualisation d'informations, interaction et fouille de donnees dans EGC'16, Reims, France (2016)
• 2015
  • B. Yang : “Memory Island: Visualizing Hierarchical Knowledge as Insightful Islands”, thesis, phd defence 06/08/2015, supervision Ganascia, Jean-Gabriel (2015)
  • A. Abi Haidar, B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Extracting and Visualizing Named Entities using Interactive Streamgraphs – A Case Study on First World War Data”, 2015 CSDH/SCHN & ACH joint conference, Ottawa, Canada (2015)
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Navigating through Memory Island of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – a demonstration of the Memory Island Technique”, 2015 CSDH/SCHN & ACH joint conference, Ottawa, Canada (2015)
• 2014
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Memory Islands: A technique for visualizing tree-structure Knowledge and Clusters with cartographic means”, Journée du GT Visualisation, Paris, France (2014)
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Creating knowledge maps using Memory Islands”, First Workshop on Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval co-located with International Conference on Digital Libraries 2014 - ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) and International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2014) (DL 2014), vol. 1311, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, London, United Kingdom, pp. 15-22 (2014)
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Visualisation des connaissances et de l’information en utilisant la technique des îles de mémoires”, Journées des groupes de travail EGC avec une session spéciale Big Data et Santé, Lille, France (2014)
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “How to Visualize Information by using the notion of Memory Islands”, Ways of SEEING MULTIDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP ON VISUALISATION AND ANALYSIS, Galway, Ireland (2014)
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “How to Visualize Information by using the notion of Memory Islands”, Acte de atelier Visualisation d'informations, interactions et fouille de données (VIF), Rennes, France, pp. 1-2 (2014)
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Cartographie des connaissances dans les humanités numériques par l’Iles de mémoires – une démonstration”, IHM'14, 26^e conférence francophone sur l'Interaction Homme-Machine, Lille, France, pp. 76-78 (2014)
• 2013
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “Memory Islands: an approach to cartographic visualization”, Classification and visualization: interfaces to knowledge, The Hague, Netherlands, pp. 137-152 (2013)
  • B. Yang, J.‑G. Ganascia : “An overview of Memory Islands – an approach for cartographic visualization”, Journées Big Data & Visualisation Fouille et Visualisation de Données Massives Big Data Mining and Visualization (FDCFGGVIF13), Paris, France (2013)