Towards a Visualization of Multi-faceted Search Results

Abstract

A common way of formulating search queries over a set of items is to select facets these items should satisfy. For example, when searching for a specific person based on specific skills, the user wants to specify the skills she is searching for. Very often, few or no search results are returned that satisfy all search facets, which leads the user to iteratively refine her search. This process is not only tedious and time consuming, but it might cause the user to miss relevant results that partially satisfy the search constraints. We present a visualization of multi-faceted data which assists the user in performing multi-faceted search. This visualization provides an overview of which data items satisfy each combination of search facets. By means of interaction and visual guidance, the user can interactively refine her search queries and retrieve the items that satisfy as much of the desired search facets as possible.