GIST: Graphical Interactive Display Tools defining a model for interactive search

Information retrieval methods represent query results in a ranked, one dimensional list without revealing connections among documents and document groups. We propose a new model of document representation and extend the notion of similarity to consider document length and word synonyms to organize documents into topically relevant groups. Matches to a user query are presented in an intuitive, interactive map that facilitates browsing information and finding the most relevant matches within the overall landscape of results. Current research is aimed at finding the best metric to group documents, and in defining the visual model. Our system, named GIST, is built using the PREFUSE toolkit for graphical display [1].