A Two-Level Adaptive Visualization for Information Access to Open-Corpus Educational Resources

The labyrinthine abundance of educational resources on the Web has greatly expanded the challenge of helping students find, organize, and use resources that will best match their individual goals, interests, and current knowledge. Map-based navigation, using technologies such as the Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), is one solution to this growing challenge. However, as the number of documents organized by SOM increases, the number of documents within each cell becomes too large for the user to make meaningful choices, overwhelming his ability to make accurate decisions. Combining interactivity with the ability to organize a large number of documents, we have developed two-level heterogeneous maps that are augmented with social navigation support. We implemented our idea within the Knowledge Sea II system and ran a pilot study using this system in an Information Retrieval course.