Visualizing Region and Scale in Information Spaces

The geographic concepts of region and scale can be preserved in semantic information spaces and depicted cartographically. Region and scale are fundamental to geographical analysis, and are also associated with cognitive and experiential properties of the real world. Scale is important when graphically representing a spatialization, as it affects the amount of detail that can be shown. Latent semantic indexing in conjunction with two different ordination techniques is employed to construct a semantic Reuters news wire space. Intramax, a hierarchical clustering algorithm, is applied to delineate semantic regions in the Reuters database based on a functional distance measure. This topological information helps to identify the appropriate levels of granularity at which the information space can be visually explored. Amplification of ordination techniques with the Intramax procedure is a useful strategy for creating scale-dependent information spaces that facilitate the exploration of abstract, complex data archives.