Visitpedia: Wiki Article Visit Log Visualization for Event Exploration

This paper proposes an interactive visualization tool, Visitpedia, to detect and analyze social events based on Wikipedia visit history. It helps users discover real-world events behind the data and study how these events evolve over time. Different from previous work based on on-line news or similar text corpora, we choose Wikipedia visit counts as our data source since the visit count data better reflect user concerns of social events. We tackle the event-based task from a time-series pattern perspective rather than semantic perspective. Various visualization and user interaction techniques are integrated in Visitpedia. Two case studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of Visitpedia.