Calibrate visualization
![This tool is created by Joris Klerkx and Riina Vuorikari at the department of Computerscience at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in cooperation with European Schoolnet in the context. It makes use of the information visualization infrastructure that was created to be able to rapidly experiment with existing information visualization techinques and different datasets. For this tool, we plugged in the Aduna Clustermap library in our framework to enable an exploration tool of social bookmarks of the Calibrate portal. The goal of this tool is to get an insight in the across border use of learning objects and social bookmarks.
This application can be tested online by clicking below on the hyperlink. For the moment the system only uses a small subset of the data that is available in the Calibrate Portal. We are aware that there are some issues like encoding problems and memory leaks, but this tool is an early prototype and therefore some bugs could surface.
In our tool we offer a novel access paradigm that enables a user to explore social bookmarks in a playful manner in a fun and engaging space. There are a number of ways that users can start the exploration of the social bookmark space and get an insight in the across border use of social bookmarks and learning objects. First of all, a user can start from an egocentric point-of-view, with an empty visualization much along the lines of the philosophy of “start with what you know, then grow”. The user can perform a keyword query after which detailed metadata about the resulting bookmarks is shown in the result list. The metadata contain among other things
all the tags that describe the objects, i.e. not only the tags of the user itself,
the country of the first user that added the object to his basket of bookmarks,
all the users that added the objects to their basket. Note that all usernames are randomly chosen as we do not cope with privacy issues just yet.
Users can click on these items by doing this add them to the cluster map visualisation. A second way of exploring is browsing the tree structure to find interesting tags, countries, languages to visualize. Users can order the tag tree alphabetically or by the number of bookmarks they describe. By adding tags to the visualization, the corresponding bookmarks, possibly tagged by different users, can be explored in the cluster map.
Users can also interact with the visualization itself by clicking on nodes and expanding these nodes and the visualization with new information.
There are a number of features that we didn’t describe here but we advise the reader to actually try-out the tool to get a real feeling what it is all about.
Any feedback on this tool can be sent to joris.klerkx[at]cs.kuleuven.be or riina.vuorika[at]cs.kuleuven.be and is much appreciated!
A paper “Visualizing Social Bookmarks” to explain the tool, based on del.icio.us data will be published online as EC-TEL ’07 workshop proceedings, as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognised ISSN publication series, with ISSN 1613-0073. An early version of this paper can be downloaded here](Calibrate%20visualisation_files/shapeimage_1.png)
