Analysis experiences using information visualization

Professional analysts deal with a high volume of information and must constantly work to separate out the valuable data. However, analysts have difficulty determining what data is useful without reading or skimming almost all returned documents from a search. This presents them with a difficult tradeoff. Searching information broadly returns hundreds or thousands of documents. We present lessons learned from an observational study of the application of the InSpire visually oriented text exploitation system in an operational analysis environment.