One month ago (already !) was Carto2.0, a conference organized by 3 actors of the French Visual Thinking scene :

• Francis Moaty : teacher at ESIEE, co-founder and director of the MISTE (Master in Scientific, Technical and Economical Intelligence)
• Claude Aschenbrenner : entreprise architect at Euroclear, blogger and member of the pedagogical team at MISTE
• Christophe Tricot : PhD, research engineer at Mondeca and blogger

The papers presented at that conference can be downloaded here, or viewed here (in Flash format), but since everything was in French, I am going to report a few bits in English as I believe it could interest more people than only French speaking readers

I was invited to present some of the research I had done for a previous blog entry on navigation interfaces for information sites last November (see a French version here : Les interfaces de navigation pour les sites d'information ). That included some best practices from leading French sites such as Rue89.com, Agoravox, … (see Social Media Club Paris for more info), but let's speak about what I have seen.

I have missed the opening words from Alain Juillet, the French Chief Representative for Economic Intelligence at SGDN, but was enthralled by Guy Melançon's opening plenary session. A doctor in mathematics from UQAM (Montréal), he now does research for CNRS' LaBRI and INRIA's Futurs - Gravite labs in Bordeaux. He has a background in graph drawing and has worked on pattern recognition in graphs. He mentioned a few very interesting references for people dealing with data-mining, BI and in general heavy information interface design :

• Visual Analytics (Thomas & Cook, 2006)
• Multi-faceted insight through interoperable images (Alfred Inselberg)
• KDD panel, the perfect data-mining tool : automated or interactive (Mihael Ankerst, 2002)
• Zoom, filter, analyze : the "Details-on-Demand" approach (Daniel Keim, 2006)
• and of course "The eyes have it" (Ben Shneiderman, 1996)
  

And he offered a solution to Tufte's limits adapted to Moore's law : make the maps interactive

He is also a strong advocate of crowdsourcing as a collaborative approach to looking for patterns in massive databases of data. He mentioned the example of IBM's Many Eyes experiment, where viewer's comments will reveal phenomenons and create new knowledge (see Catherine Lenglet's article on this blog last year)

We then had a presentation by Serge Guillard on business mapping. A director at Mark Company, he is a strong advocate of organization mapping (process, org charts, activities, procedures, job descriptions, …). His presentation was very exhaustive, including examples of work he'd done for Carglass and the CNES. Serge is the co-author of a book on graphical process description : free Visio templates to download here.

We then had very interesting presentations from leading French companies in the data crawling / intelligent agents fields (Cybion) and search engine / data visualization fields (Kartoo). 

Cybion was started in 1995 by Carlo Revelli (also the founder of Agoravox), and quickly made a name in search, with some of the first intelligent agents, crawling the web to gather information on a given subject (we did not have Google at that time ;-). Their presentation (made by Mounir Rochdi, founder of the first competitive intelligence community in Marocco) was on risk analysis and crisis anticipation on internet : identification, mapping, evaluation, simulation and display on a dashboard.

The next presentation was by Laurent Baleydier, CEO and founder of Kartoo (founded in 2001, see a recent article by The Next Web). He presented 3 strategies for search on Internet, very smart approaches that can help us sorting out information :

• take a bird's eye view, using semantic maps, and then zoom in on the zones of interest (Kartoo's speciality but also Quintura) ;
• start with a fixed / known point and navigate away from it (think Musicovery, Flickr of YouTube network graphs) ;
• or for those complex searches (10% of the requests = 50% of the time spent searching), use tools that recommend keywords to refine search such as Grokker or KVisu (Kartoo's new tool).

As an interesting feedback, he shared with us that most of KVisu's search users start with the list and after 1 months usage of the maps increase by 30%. This proves a rather quick learning curve that was made possible through a very structured usability  / HCI design process of the tool. Kartoo is a Google partner (they distribute their Google Mini and Search Appliance). See more info on their blog.

The last presentation I attended was Maxime Crepel and Dominique Boullier's. Dominique, whom I first met as head of the Lutin usability lab, presented us with Maxime their research objectives. They focus on tagclouds as graphical interface for navigation (and you know I am a fan ;-). Also the director of the Las lab (Sociology and Anthropology) in Rennes (see the blog he co-author with Audrey Lohard on virtual worlds as part of a research project), he works with Maxime (PhD student, also engineer at the SENSE lab at Orange R&D), whom I had already heard as he worked on "weak cooperations" with Dominique Cardon and Nicolas Pissard (now with faberNovel), and some other projects (see the website anoptique.org).

They are among other things trying to measure the level of information depth (colors, font size) that is appropriate for an optimal use.

Among the presentations I have missed (but I had the opportunity to chat with them and re-discover their work) were (non exhaustive list) :

• Guilhem Fouetillou's. He is the co-founder and President of the RTGI Group, the editor of a very nice visualization engine that was used during the last French presidential election to display the Blogopole, a map of all political blogs by affinity. See a very interesting presentation on Slideshare describing all kinds of social network analysis he did. He is now doing it for the US 2008 election :

• Jean Delahousse, founder of Mondeca, a French semantic web company, who did a presentation of cartography and ontologies.

• Olivier Nerot, founder of amoWeba and Social Computing, who designed the network navigation tool used by Societe.com to analyze company's board members, and investors links with other individuals or companies. A great competitive intelligence tool :

• Christophe Douy, from Pikko Software, editor of the Arak4Wiki solution, a complete solution for wiki editing and navigation, including EasyKube (treemaps), VisionLink (network graphs), etc… that looks very powerful and builds on works from the same CNRS Labri lab from Bordeaux where Guy Melancon works.

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Vous y trouverez une bio de tous les intervenants et une synthèse de leurs interventions. Pour ma part je participe à la table-ronde "Cartographie et débats" de 13h45 à 15h15 avec Alain Garnier et Thomaso Venturini, et j'y parlerai du sujet "Les interfaces de navigation pour les sites d'information" (cf mon précédent article dans ce blog).

Téléchargez le programme détaillé et la carte synthétique de la journée.

A jeudi à Marne la Vallée ! 

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Bonjour,

Pour tous les “visual thinkers”, les “information designers” et les designers des connaissances ça se passait à San Francisco les 27, 28 et 29 janvier dernier … et j’y étais
J’ai rédigé un compte-rendu (pour une fois en français) qui est disponible sur ce blog : http://blog.fabernovel.com/goingout/
Bonne lecture … et à bientôt pour un post sur les labels, les sceaux et autres marques de confiance.

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A few weeks ago was held the second meeting of the Social Media Club Paris, started by Pierre-Yves P. (one of my 2 partners at faberNovel Consulting) and Alban M. (renowned author of "L'Age de Peer" and currently working for Orange - France Telecom). We had around the table the founders of some of the most advanced participative news sites in France : L. Mauriac (Rue89), C. Revelli (Agoravox), B. Thieulin (Desirsdavenir), G. Champeau (Ratiatum), J. Jacob (Obiwi), etc… Among the very interesting things that were said that evening on fostering and managing online participation and debates, there were a few on visualization.

Technology, said T. Vedel (IEP Paris), brings some solutions and create new difficulties. Two avenues are possible:

• aggregation or large quantities of information with visualization tools (mapping, semantic analysis, synopti vision, …) to facilitate the entry in the debate
• or the use of knowledge trees (see below the example done synthesizing motions of the 2005 Congress of the French Party Socialiste), using color codes to show votes in a more efficient manner than arithmetic averages

The problem with dealing with a large quantity of information he said is our "limited cognitive abilities and cultural resources". "The image is the dominant language in politics as it has the capacity both to transport a lot of information and emotion" he concluded.

The issues that have been experimented in the political science field (where debates are a core component) are also critical to modern information websites, where a debate/discussion happens in the comments and extend the article, but also the mass of articles themselves could be seen as a debate on some topics, showing different arguments and their evolution. I am going to list the most used here, explain their limits and illustrate them with examples

• Tagcloud: I have already presented it as it is one of my favorite knowledge design techniques, because I think it is both simple and has great potential for KM. Originally designed to display keywords associated to a text by the author and readers, but also experimentally used to synthesize, or present key arguments in a text (see the analysis of French candidates political speaches by French linguist Jean Veronis). You can read more at Peter Vander Wal's Infocloud: he is the one who coined the term "folksonomy"). A free tool to create tagclouds is TagCrowd. Below is an example taken from Amazon's new Inside This Book concordance analysis feature, available on books that are part of the Search Inside the Book program.

As you can judge, this feature is not yet very useful : can you guess what the "Tipping Point" book from Malcolm Gladwell is all about ? Not really a synthesis You see that to be useful you have to trim your text from non-significant or not-significant-enough words, and probably go for a different algorythm altogether than the most frequent words.

Amazon is experimenting with various (and numerous !) techniques to synthesize texts but none really seem very effective: Key Phrases (Statistically Improbable Phrases, or Capitalized Phrases) don't return some of the words or phrases you would expect such as mavens, connectors, … Text Stats will only interest fans of bizarre statistics or adepts of Freakonomics. Only the Citations give you some meaningful data, but not really useful the way they are presented here. But I will come back to this later (with the Touchgraph tool).

There are 2 other ones you can find : heatmaps (applied on treemaps) and network maps.

• Heatmap: one of the best example can be found at Newsmap, presenting live news from Google News (via Infosthetics), used on Rue89.com, both using the Marumushi tool

Another nice heatmap is this one (via Smashing Magazine), displaying the zones of intense debate/battle on Wikipedia.

• Networkmaps: very much used for music discovery, LivePlasma's engine has been used at CNet News.com in 2005 under the name BigPicture, but this flash widget has disappeared recently (see Robert Scoble's post and a more recent one here with a link to a similar application by LinkSViewer). One of the best apps for this is TouchGraph, which has been adapted for Amazon (with books often bought by similar profiles), Google (with links between websites), Facebook (with pictures from friends) or Del.icio.us (with related tags).

So ? Some taste of the semantic web ? So far only the heatmap seems to have lasting success with information sites, the network map didn't stick so far, despite good reviews from experts (see Olivier Ertzscheid's blog). Those new interfaces still have to be improved a lot to be used by casual, everyday users, but are already very useful for some professionals in the information analysis sector, which seems to be the primary market for the editors of those tools. Adam Ostrow at Mashable has a good selection of dataviz tools you might want to check, as well as the Smashing Magazine.

We have also seen some original / innovative visualization techniques popping up here and there, some taking a social or time approach to linking and visualizing content:

• Radial graphs: some are used to display social connections in a network or community around an individual, like those influenced by Facebook's Friend Wheel and the idea of a "social graph" representing all connections between members of a community in a graphical way. For others, the idea is to represent the 4th dimension of time as a wheel, and adding the connections inside it like spokes.

But again, also it may look nice, understanding it is not intuitive, and time is still best shown … as time like in many animated graphics (see the best example with Hans Rosling's Trendanalyzer) or using a timeline (see Dandelife).

The last solutions are using 3D environments, either pure mathematical constructions such as network representations, very similar in a way to space/galaxy navigation see also the incredible Universe experiment by J. Harris, or real-life environments, based for example on city or landscape metaphors. More advanced metaverse metaphors could be developped, using diverse immersive tools, like those displayed in movies (eg Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas, and Demi Moore) and sci-fi books (eg Tom Clancy's NetForce collection of books) or the "must" in VR machines such as the "Virtusphere" shown below.

Let's hope someone will come up with better stuff than that to explore information

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This is the end of August and the agendas are filled with "summer universities" like the French Entrepreneur's Federation MEDEF (see their live / cross blogging initiative I have been invited to take part on the blog Jouer le Jeu, aka Play the Game), and some companies like Capgemini Consulting for which I will host a workshop on some topics I am sharing with you today, going over some of my past year discoveries and learnings.

We live in an information world and the pure volume of information available is increasing exponentially (IDC/EMC 2007 and Berkeley 2003 studies). At the same time the number of interactions (as one-way or two-way ponctual information exchanges) between persons and/or computers is multiplying rapidly, thanks to the internet revolution and the globalization of our economy. Those « connections » (permanent associations or punctual contacts) are creating a number of opportunities to solve the everyday issues we are facing with.

Thanks to new tools (creation) and economical opportunities (incentives) the distinction between information producers and consumers is not static anymore, this is what has been called the revolution of social media (user generated content, folksonomics, wisdom of crowds, …) :

• Brands need to rethink their communication with their consumers, engage in a conversation with them, build and sustain communities of users ;
• Knowledge (long thought to be limited to encyclopedias, academic books, …) does not consist in « one-off », elitist and formal products anymore since Wikipedia democratized it’s creation and sharing ;
• Managers need to take more and more decisions within a shorter time frame, often with too much data to analyze, or too much « noise » and not enough pertinent information ;
• Major undertakings do not necessarily require major investments from one individual organization as « crowd sourcing » or distributed computing solutions have allowed to search for lost individuals or to analyze large quantities of data ;

This is an overview of experimental solutions to this issue, that I have separated in 2 aspects (some products are doing both, but this a minority) :

• Traceability : new tools that keep track of every information exchange in a standardized, searchable and « mashable » format :
• search engines and crawlers such as Google (Search History, Trends, and Co-Op tools like the Tracker and Customized Search Engine), and Technorati,
• social tagging tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and Stickis,
• and crowdsourcing tools such as VisiblePath, Amazon’s ACF and Mechanical Turk, and Inkling Prediction Markets ;
• Visualization : new tools that allow easy analysis, interpretation of data to create knowledge and presentation / sharing to an audience :
• data display tools such as IBM’s ManyEyes, GapMinder's Trendalyzer, and Swivel,
• words / tags display tools such as VisualThesaurus, Delicious' Tagclouds,  and Kartoo,
• 3D visualization tools such as Microsoft’s Photosynth, and Google's Sketchup (included in Google Earth),
• social networks visualization tools such as LivePlasma, TouchGraph, Facebook’s FriendWheel, and VisiblePath,
• and online sharing versions of presentation tools such as mind mapping, and Powerpoint SlideShare.

On the definition and etymology of innovation and creativity, the differences between information types : click here

A gallery of the largest collection of visualization techniques and use examples : VisualComplexity

For fun : a nice application that links song lyrics to images randomly extracted from Flickr, and another analyzing breakups (called The Dumpster) between people from blog comments.

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Information sharing in web1.0 was one way publishing, static, and subject to a quick de facto obsolessence by the sheer amount of information created that would render this one impossible to reach.

By contrast information sharing in web 2.0 recognizes that information is most of the time an expression of a knowledge, which is embodied in an individual.

Finding the exact information you need (the answer to a simple question) on an intranet for example, is often a vain quest for many reasons :

• people don't add critical metadata to uploaded documents,
• the search engines do not access all databases and are not good enough to cope with natural language or unstructured data,
• and more important, you don't have on an intranet enough information because the number of contributors simply can not be large enough vs the number of readers, …

What you then need is some kind of virtual breadcrumbs which will lead you to the individual most likely to hold the best answer … for a quick phone call or email ! Such tools such as Visible Path do a good job to automatically monitor many informations exchanges (email) or other pieces of information. What you need is a system that seamlessly collects that collective intelligence and gives you an effective way to pull the answers you need from it (think visualization :-)), and I am confident a workable B2E solution can be developed out of the tagclouds, probably something linking it with visualization tools like VisualThesaurus for a drill-down in the information, but keeping a sense of weight/importance given by the size of the words.

Then of course you can add a voluntary system where real contributions can be added on top of it, from simply tagging (see Cogenz for example) to actually post "hard" information. About motivations for those 1% of contributors, see my previous January blog post for more details on how one organization should develop tools for employees to develop their reputation inside the company. For more on the 1% rule (1:9:90 in fact ;-)), see the blog post on participation inequality from Jakob Nielsen or the recent HitWise stats shown at the April 2007 Web2.0 Expo. 

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You can not escape it if you are a media consumer : we are in France in the last run to elect our future president. An election, especially a major one, is a fantastic opportunity to witness the advance in visualization techniques. I am going to try to list the ones I found most powerful and innovative : 

• Tagclouds : a very innovative technique that appeared in conjunction with the development of folksonomics (see Thomas Vander Wal's blog for more info), I first noticed it in the French politics arena last summer in some French newspapers (see a more recent article in Le Monde). The articles displayed tagclouds authored by French linguist Jean Véronis who analyzed the words used by the candidates in their public speeches (see his blog entry). A nice open source tool for generating such tagclouds is the very good TagCrowd ;

• Network maps : a now very common display technique (see VisualComplexity's website for good examples), probably the best example I have seen so far in the politics arena is the blogosphere's mapping of the socialist candidate Segolene Royal (see the Segoland map). Such mapping can be done with the very good tool TouchGraph, also used as a plug-in for FaceBook social networking site (see the Interactive Friend Thing tool in the developpers' tool directory), or more automatically using IP addresses in a Google Analytics report (the so-called Geo Map Overlay) ;

• Cartograms : a complete discovery to me, in a recent article by French newspaper Libération (here, but not anymore available for free), they were authored by French cartograph Dominique Andrieu (see his webpage with map animations). They belong to the class of anamorphosis, the map being distorted by the weight of the cities' population. They give an immediate view / understanding of where the voters from a given party are from (here the periphery of the cities). The script (called ArcScript) is available from ESRI website ;

All those techniques try to give meaning to an ocean of data, to extract the hidden truth behind words and numbers, most of the time in order to facilitate decision (choosing a political strategy, or a candidate to vote for). But those are only 3 examples out of so many different approaches, most of which rely on algorithms (topological, …), and choosing the best one for a specific purpose might be the type of skill large companies might be looking for in their data-mining, geomarketing or BI departments !!

Update : see the very good blog network visualization engine on http://www.blogopole.fr/ on a visualization technology from RTGI and Exalead's crawler / search engine

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