Constrained region selection method based on configuration space for visualization in scientific dataset search

We consider constrained label placement problem considering touch interface such as smartphone or tablet. For scientific dataset search, the search results are shown on the global map based on spatial information. There spatial region are often unevenly distributed and most of them are overlapped each other. To select non-overlapped regions from overlapped regions can be considered as a combinational optimization problem which is known as NP-hard. Also, the applications for touch interface should be designed considering finger pad size. In this paper, we propose rectangular label placement method in configuration space for scientific dataset search with touch interface. The idea of configuration is often used for path planning for robots to avoid obstacles. The proposed method apply the idea of configuration space to find the un-overlapped regions to show the selectable regions for touch interface. Furthermore, the relevance between search query and each datasets are considered, so that the user can select more relevant datasets from original search results. This method can be applied not only for scientific dataset search system but also any other applications which shows their results in global map. The experimental evaluations show that the proposed method achieves superior performance to the compared methods.