Georges Grinstein
Center for Biomolecular and Medical Informatics, USA
Title: Anticipatory linked context sensitive access to broadly heterogeneous data
Biography
Biography: Georges Grinstein
Abstract
We will describe a prototype, InfoMaps, an extension to weave, a widely open-source data access, analysis and visualization platform. InfoMaps facilitates knowledge discovery by allowing an analyst to simultaneously explore complex and distributed data from diverse data sources that vary in their degree of structure. InfoMaps has a broad applicability to discover explicit and implicit linkages in data collected from document collections, audio and video files, proprietary reports, biological databases, prescriptions, insurance claims and memos. InfoMaps utilizes context sensitive access where keys relevant to the current state of the data visualized (the context) are used to access other relevant records from other, possibly non-visualized data sources. This relevance can be temporal, geospatial, or any other ontological relationship. User selected records in the structured data visualizations are automatically linked with related unstructured data records, and vice versa, whether or not the records are currently being accessed or visualized. InfoMaps is also an anticipatory system. As a user interacts with visualizations or the system accesses data, InfoMaps can continually monitor pre-identified peripheral data sources to access and present those records that are contextually relevant. This is done by retrieving document, audio, image, graphics or video files related to data that are being visualized and analysed using context sensitive ontologies with generated topics. InfoMaps can easily be scaled from a single individual to an entire organization while ensuring layout consistency at those levels to enhance analyst cognition and accelerate organizational learning.
