Kartoo’s Visu: Semantic Search Plus Themescape Visualization
May 11, 2008
In England in December 2007, I saw a brief demonstration of Kartoo.com’s “thematic map”, which was announced in 2005.
The genesis for the company was developed from the relationships with large publishing groups into 1997. Mr. Baleydier was working to make CD-ROMs easily searchable. Founded in 2001 by Laurent and Nicholas Baleydier to provide a more advanced search interface. You can find out more about the company at Kartoo.net. Kartoo S.A. offers a no-charge metasearch Web system at Kartoo.com.
The original Kartoo service was one of the first to use dynamic graphics for Web search. Over the last few years, the interface became more refined. But the system presented links in the form of dynamic maps. Important Web sites were spherical, and the spheres were connected by lines. Here’s an example of the basic Kartoo interface as it looked on May 11, 2008, for the query “semantic search” run against the default of English Web sites. (The company also offers Ujiko.com, which is worth a quick look. The interface is a bit too abstract for me. You can try it here.)
The dark blue “ink blots” connect related Web sites. The terms provide an indication of the type of relationship between or among Web sites. You can click on this interface and explore the result set and perform other functions. Exploration of the interface is the best way to explore its features. Describing the mouse actions is not as effective as playing with the system.
Another company–Datops SA–was among the first to use interesting graphic representations of results. I recall someone telling me that the spheres that once characterized Groxis.com’s results had been influenced by a French wizard. Whether justified or not, when I saw spheres and ink blots, I said to myself, “Ah, another vendor influenced by French interface design”. In talking with people who use visualizations to help their users understand a “results space”, I’ve had mixed feedback. Some people love impressionistic representations of results; others, don’t. Decades ago I played a small role in the design of the F-15 interface or heads-up display. The one lesson I learned from that work was that under pressure, interfaces that offer too many options can paralyze reaction time. In combat, that means the pilot could be killed trying to figure out what graphics means. In other situations where a computational chemist is trying to make sense of 100,000 possible structures, a fine-grained visualization of the results may be appropriate.
Visu
For the last day, I have been running queries to see how this system stacks up to my other search tools. My conclusion: it’s worth a look. You can try this service yourself by navigating to the Visu Web site.
The interface for Visu makes a real effort to present a large amount of information without confusing the user. Here’s the results for the same query “semantic search” on the Kartoo Visu beta service:
The results appear in a left-hand panel. If you click on a hyperlink, a new window opens and shows you the results. To make this work, you have to turn off pop up blockers and any other software you may use to prevent hostile code from affecting your browser. My tests show that Visu is benign. Just remember to turn on your software defenses when you are finished using the service.
Note that there is a hot link that allows a user to “vote”. The idea is that the text processing engine includes a “social” or voting component. Google’s made it clear that paying attention to user actions pays huge relevancy dividends for many types of queries. You will also see a tiny flag. The result set tells you the language of the Web site, which is a helpful feature, but I must admit, I don’t recognize the flags of some European countries. (The use of flags is popping up in other Web sites; for example, EUFeeds.) You can use the tabs on the left hand side of the results display to filter the results. This is a useful feature, but I found myself working through the results by “theme” or cluster.
You can see the themescape in the green panel. This is a clear tiled presentation of the major groups of content in the result set. You will have to navigate to the Web site to read the words on the themescape because WordPress makes it difficult to use higher-resolution graphics. The presentation is for me quite useful. For example, I see at a glance:
- The core of the result sets is fragmented across a number of topics, which makes clear that there is no one dominant “theme” for this topic
- In the result set, Google and Hakia have been identified as key players terms by tile size. Although IBM (Ominifind) and Yahoo appear in the center of the display, the tile size gives me a sense about the amount of information available for Google’s and Hakia’s semantic efforts
- I am able to identify key issues quickly; for example, the importance to semantic search of concepts and language. I can also see that an entity called “Clanewski” is important
- The interface has some quirks; for example, the screen lay out is designed for monitors with a resolution greater than 1024×768. But the beta system includes a “saved query” function that makes it convenient to review and modify previous queries.
In terms of usefulness, my exploration of these “tiles” yielded a number of sources I had already identified as important. The real plus for me was that I located some new sources that I want to explore.
Observations
Semantic systems are becoming more widely available. Despite the post-processing of results from the metasearch launched to obtain results, the system operated with modest latency. On my Verizon high-speed wireless card, there were some time outs. These were due to Verizon’s data network, not Kartoo’s technology. Other points that struck me were:
- The service was quite useful, unlike some semantic search systems and visualization systems that I have used
- The “tiles” metaphor was more useful than I thought it would be. After some experimentation, I grew to like the thematic “map” or “map tiles” method
- I encountered some mouse behavior oddities, but there were minor compared to the utility of the service.
The Visu service is worth a test drive. I’m not certain that if the interface is a home run in a behind-the-firewall search system. For certain organizations, Visu may be a useful alternative to text-only point-and-click interfaces.
Stephen Arnold, May 11, 2008
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