An Interactive Graphical Interface for Retrieving Multi-attribute Data: A Case Study on Historical Relics Retrieval in 3D Digital Museum

Information retrieval (IR) has become more and more important in our daily lives. But there are few graphical interfaces or tools that can represent complex data querying and the searching process. This paper proposes a visual tool for multi-attribute data retrieval. The tool provides a Voronoi treemap combined with a selected path tree (SPT) on one window to conduct information retrieval according to different attributes of data, which are organized by a Voronoi treemap, and the other window is used to show retrieval results synchronously. Herein, SPT is used to record user's selection of attributes and is visually superimposed on Voronoi treemap. It may be composed of different levels of nodes in Voronoi treemap and it records the operations of attributes - Union, Intersection and Complement- during the attributes selecting process. Users can also adjust the SPT interactively according to displayed results on the other window. Finally, the paper gives some examples of selecting historical relics in 3D digital museum design system based on double touch-screen. The results prove the usability and effectiveness of our work.