InfoZoom Software presenter Andrew Trieu ICS 280 Information Visualization Department ICS at UCI April 18 2002 InfoZoom InfoZoom is a unique tool to pinpoint and analyze information for decision making InfoZoom s complementary views on your data let you discover patterns and relationships in context that can you can grasp and analyze via mouse click InfoZoom lets you distill knowledge from data Sources can be tables in plain ASCII format or any ODBC capable database InfoZoom con t InfoZoom lets you create and edit project and present Infoscapes Infoscapes Infoscape is the author s term for a new type of interactive communication media An Infoscape is a projection without natural limitations to your ability to rearrange items very swiftly while you interact with it And that is where focussing in on Objects in an Infoscape is really much more powerful than zooming in on a landscape Example of Infoscapes Suppose you want to see a cathedral on the extreme right of your landscape a castle on the extreme left side by side in order to compare architectural details no zoom lens in the world will do that for you But in an Infoscape you can easily display two initially remote items side by side to compare them in details InfoZoom will do that for you at the click of a button Infoscapes Group of Functions Using InfoZoom and working with Infoscapes involves three groups of functions Editing the Infoscape Controlling the projection Documenting and presenting results Editing an Infoscape Editing an Infoscape is essentially a two step process in the first step you modify the information set held in the RAM of your PC in a second independent step you may save the modifications in a file on disk Note in some cases you can not perform the second step because of file format However you can always modify the information set in RAM which is essential for all sophisticated analyses File Format InfoZoom reads and writes files in a number of formats Proprietary file format extension fox Read only file format extension fop Chart file format extension chf InfoZoom text file format extension foc Import file format extension txt Import file format extension csv Controlling the Projection Controlling the projection that creates a new Infoscape is at the heart of using InfoZoom and working with Infoscape It involves four groups of functions Focussing in on Attributes i e bringing close together on your screen those Attributes rows that are relevant for the analyses at hand Choosing the most appropriate among the three views that the Infoscape can be displayed in Controlling the Projection con t Focussing in on Objects i e displaying those and only those Objects that satisfy your criteria and showing those details of Attribute values that you really need to know Sorting the Objects columns of an Infoscape by their values of an Attribute Focussing in on Attributes can be achieved by a combination of Moving Attribute rows regrouping Attributes hierarchically Hiding manually selected Attributes Automatically hiding Attributes that do not help to further focus in on Objects Choosing the appropriate view The Overview is the most compact projection Each Attribute row is displayed like a horizontal stack of bars in a bar chart fitted to the width of the Infoscape window Attribute values are sorted and combined in bars of identical values Multi value bars can represent similar Attribute values The Compressed Table view preserves the association of Attribute values to Objects Objects are presented as columns in the table The Wide Table view which may extend horizontally beyond the Infoscape window so you may have to scroll to inspect all Object columns Overview view Compressed Table view Wide Table view Focussing in on Objects You focus in on Objects by creating a new Infoscape a new projection that eliminates all Objects with the selected or the nonselected Attribute values sorts Objects in ascending or descending order of their Attribute values and groups together all Objects with identical values of a selected Attribute magnifies all or selected columns or bars displaying Attribute values that had been hidden in multiobject cells or multi value bars Documenting presenting results InfoZoom lets you print the Infoscape on any printer installed on your system and helps you to keep the printed pages organized The Print Preview function les you resize an Infoscape in Overview or Compressed Table view so it fits nicely on the printed page InfoZoom lets you create elaborate business graphics from your selection of the Infoscape data Include these charts in your screen presentation or your printed report