• 2006
• Domain
• Exhibit map
• Project link

Information scientist Katy Börner, graphic designer Elisha F. Hardy, and research programmers Bruce W. Herr II and Todd M. Holloway of the Information Visualization Lab at Indiana University designed and implemented the Taxonomy Visualization (TV) tool in collaboration with interaction designer W. Bradford Paley. The tool supports the semi¬automatic validation and optimization of organization schemas imposed on a data set as a means of structuring and naming. By showing the “goodness of fit” of a schema and the potentially millions of items it organizes, the TV eases the identification and reclassification of misclassified information entities. It also helps with identifying classes that grew over-proportionally, evaluating the size and homogeneity of existing classes, and examining the “well-formedness” of an organization schema. The TV shows the organization schema as a hierarchy in which sublevels are indented according to their depth in the hierarchy. Item properties are represented by bar graphs on the left-hand side of the schema. Item and class interrelations are denoted by line overlays. The map displays the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent classification, which organizes 3 million patents into about 160,000 distinct patent classes. Exemplarily shown are two patents, together with, respectively, their prior art and impact.