Infomat 1.0

A Short Manual

Magnus Rosell 2007

Content

Introduction

Infomat is a vector space visualization tool. It allows you to display a matrix, and group, order and alter it. You may do this along the rows or columns.

Any information stored in a matrix may be investigated using Infomat, but it is primarily aimed at Information Retrieval. It is optimized for sparse matixes.

Further information can be found in the "readme.txt", the javadoc of the program, and on the Infomat website.

Interface overview

The main window is divided into four sections. At the top is the menu, below that the toolbar and under that the grouping panel. The main view is the fourth section.

There are several other windows that appear in certain situation. From the beginning the over view is shown. A rectangle in it shows what part of the matrix that is currently shown in the main view.

In the following sections the main window sections and the other windows will be described briefely

Main View

The main view displays the matrix. The opacity of the pixels are proportional to the weight of the matrix elements they represent.

Menu and Toolbar

This sections contains a short account for the available menu options. As the toolbar contains convenient short cuts to some of the options it is described here as well.

When a matrix is loaded and the mouse pointer is moving over the main view the row and column objects is is currently pointoing to is displayed in the toolbar.

File

In the file meny you can save and load matrix files. You can also load "corpus files" and "document grouping files". These serves as a connection between my personal clustering program. You are probably better off not looking in to them... :)

It is also possible to save the picture in the main view as .png-file.

File Formats

The xml-formats are quite straight forward. You should be able to figure them out by looking at the examples, see the "readme.txt".

Image

The toolbar is divied into two sections, with two and six buttons.

The four first menu options on the Image menu corresponds to the four first icons in the second button section:

The following two menu options concers the columns. One can delete columns by click-drag-release (the second last icon in the toolbar) and toggle the group separators on/off (the first icon). The same features for the rows are found in the next two options.

The last option in the Image menu is the possibility to reset the zoom entirely.

All functions work in both the main view and the overview.

Windows

The options in the Windows menu are all toggle options. You can turn the toolbar, the grouping panel, the pixel info window and the overview window on or off.

The pixel info window shows information on the pixel the mouse pointer is currently pointing on. It is easily confused with the window that appears in the "pixel selection process" descirbed in the section on the Image menu.

The grouping panel is described in its own section.

Tools

There are two tools. To invert the matrix speaks for it self.

"Purge matrix" removes all objects that are not displayed in the overview. If you for instance have deleted certain uniteresting objects from a grouping this function removes the from the matrix and from all other groupings.

Algorithms

There are three algorithms. If you choose either one a algorithm window will appear. In it you can decide if you want to cluster rows or columns. The algorithms all have some proerties that can be altered, like for instance the number of clusters. The algorithm window explains these properties rather weill.

Help

Try them! :)

Grouping Panel

Through the grouping panel all handling of the groupings is deviced. It is divided into two sections, one for rows and one for columns. They work similarily.

The topmost drop down menu displays the currently selected grouping. When you choose the grouping here the order of the objects along the dimension (rows or columns) changes.

The bottom drop down menu selects the coloring grouping. For the rows this leads to a coloring of the pixels, and for the columns a coloring of the background columns. The pixels are averaged over the matrix elements they represents, while the column coloring is averaged over the entire columns.

When the "S" button beside each drop down menu is pressed a grouping settings window is displayed.

Grouping Settings Window

The grouping settings window looks a little different depending on which of the four groupings it concerns. They all have the following sections:

For coloring groupings you can change the color of each group in the groups panel. The change does not take effect until you press the "Apply" button in the coloring panel which (for coloring groupings) is located between the reordering panel and the file panel. There you can also reset the coloring to the default colors.

The opacity of the pixels can be altered in the "row show" grouping settings window and the opacity of the column coloring in the "column coloring" grouping settings window. By default the column coloring opacity has a lower range than the pixel opacity.

Example

In the directory .../Infomat/example/ you find a few files to start with.