TagCircus

Exploring network-like data with multi-touch. TagCircus supports the explorative search and data analysis from a metadata perspective.

TagCircus is a tool that combines data visualization and multi-touch technology to construct search queries from tags. It visualizes tag relations and distributions within the search result and also the amount of excluded tags by a particular query. The graphical representation takes advantage of the abilities of our visual perception and helps us to gradually construct a model of related subjects. TagCircus can be used as a search interface for information-gathering as well as for analytic tasks regarding the underlying semantic structures.

Interaction

Users can touch tags in order to reveal all the relations to other tags, or to add these to the search query with a double tap gesture. The application executes the search query on every change and visualizes the results to give the user instantaneous feedback. The whole visualization can be scaled and rotated with common gestures and thus passed among different users.

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The user reveals all relations of a tag within the search result.

Use cases

The large tabletop display makes the concept particularly applicable to multi-user scenarios such as in companies or public spaces rather than personal use cases. It could, for instance, be applied to enterprise information systems or product search.