A VISUAL LANGUAGE COMPILER FOR INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL BY VISUAL REASONING

We present a visual language compiler for information retrieval by visual reasoning. When the database grows larger and larger, how to get at the data becomes a major problem. We describe an approach based upon data visualization and visual reasoning. The main idea is to transform the data objects and present sample data objects in a visual space. The user can use a visual language to incrementally formulate the information retrieval request in the visual space. This paper describes a prototype system with the following main features: 1) it is built on top of the SIL-ICON visual language compiler, and therefore can be customized for different application domains; 2) it supports a fuzzy icon grammar to define reasonable visual sentences; 3) it incorporates a semantic model of the database for fuzzy visual query translation; and 4) it incorporates a VisualNet which stores the knowledge learned by the system in its interaction with the user so that the VisualReasoner can adapt its behavior. © 1990 IEEE