A system for visualizing the viewpoints of information and its application to intelligent activity support

The authors have built and evaluated several systems to assist creative concept formation by professional engineers and scientists. Through experiments, it has become clear that a system that can reveal different viewpoints automatically is strongly needed by many users to support their creative activities. We are all surrounded by an almost infinite amount of information. If we can elicit different viewpoints from large information sources, we can arrive at new understandings that could not have been possible through discussions with other persons alone. This paper presents a system that automatically elicits and visualizes different viewpoints of authors concerning certain topics from a text database of journal and conference papers. Users can review different viewpoints of a topic of interest by looking at a space configured by the system. Through interaction with the system, users are expected to build their own concepts creatively. The effect of promoting creative concept formation and other benefits, such as enhanced information retrieval and knowledge sharing, have been validated by several experiments