Visualising sequences of queries: a new tool for information retrieval

This paper describes a system that uses visualisation to assist a user in dealing with the information returned from a search engine. The user's queries, and the documents they return, are represented by a 3D spatial structure that shows their relationships and provides a way of accessing and exploring the documents retrieved. It is implemented to work with the New Zealand Digital Library, a set of large document collections that is available over the Web. The visualisation scheme is a Java applet that is updated dynamically whenever the user makes a new search, and can be browsed alongside the search engine.