Invited Speaker Seminar: Visual Tools for Interacting with Large Semantic Networks

Charles-Antoine Julien
Assistant Professor
School of Information Studies, McGill University

Thursday, November 13, 2014 at 4:00 p.m.
Room EV003.309

Abstract

Useful real-work semantic networks tend to be large and complex, which makes them difficult to browse and navigate by humans. Visual interfaces can mitigate this problem but these tools inevitably suffer from scalability issues, which have led to the development of various clutter reduction techniques such as sampling and filtering. We present and discuss ongoing work concerning visual tools for information exploration and retrieval using large semantic ontology networks (e.g., Library of Congress Subject Headings, Medical Subject Headings, personal information folder structures), which aim to help searchers describe and recognize the information they seek, and discover previously unknown and valuable topics.

Biography

Charles-Antoine Julien is an assistant professor at the McGill School of Information Studies where he teaches databases, Web systems and information retrieval. During his first career as a business information systems programmer, analyst and trainer, he became passionate about researching, developing, and testing novel and appreciated information interfaces. He has published on information visualization, simplification of information organization structures, next-generation library catalogues, and human-computer interaction.