A user centered approach to developing information visualization module for NEIMiner

NEIMiner is an integrated information system for studying the nanomaterial environmental impact (NEI). However, there is a lack of visual analytic tools that efficiently query and present large-scaled bibliography meta-data and NEI characterizations in a meaningful way. This paper presents the design and implementation efforts of developing the information visualization (InfoVis) module for NEIMiner. We first describe a user centered design approach to identify the analysis tasks, to select suitable visual representations, and to iteratively validate and improve the development. We then show that how existing techniques, such as graph simplification, enriched visualization algorithms and interactive features, can be usefully combined to aid users gaining insights. We demonstrate the utility of Info Vis through scenarios of constructing co-authorship network, bibliography keywords network, and nanomaterial terms co-occurrence network. We implement our techniques as a Drupal module. Our design is supportive for analysts and researchers to identify concepts and relationships in studying environmental impact of nanomaterial.