Adapting a map query interface for a gesturing touch screen interface

Abstract

NewsStand is an example application of a general framework that we are developing to enable searching for information using a map query interface, where the information results from monitoring the output of over 8,000 RSS news sources and is available for retrieval within minutes of publication. The user interface of NewsStand was recently adapted so that NewsStand can execute on mobile and tablet devices with a gesturing touch screen interface such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. This action led to a discovery of some shortcomings of current mapping APIs as well as devising some interesting new widgets. These issues are discussed, and the realization can be seen by a demo at http:// newsstand.umiacs.umd.edu on any of the above Apple devices as well as other devices that support gestures such as an Android phone.

Contextual Source Selection for Federated Search in Mobile Environment

“…Several approaches propose adaptive methods for research results visualization [22], and geographic search interfaces usability [8]. Another category of work addressed the facility entering queries [23] and exploiting suggestion, [24] and autocompletion [25] to help the user to express his informational needs.…”

Sorting in Space: Multidimensional, spatial, and metric data structures for applications in spatial databases, geographic information systems (GIS), and location-based services

“…Moreover, in some cases we are not even sure that the term "Washington" denotes a location as it could be a reference to the name of a person (i.e., "toponym recognition") [32]. This can be the case when processing documents such as newspaper articles [34], [67], [77], [96], tweets [86], blogs, etc. Being able to handle such specifications enables the development of map query interfaces to a wide range of spatially-referenced data thereby enabling the development of new applications such as disease tracking [30] as well as the hidden web [36].…”

Identification of live news events using Twitter

“…By adding the ability to identify future events and integrating this service with Twitter, we can extend our previous works NewsStand [22,28] and TwitterStand [23] by adding a temporal component to their spatial displays. The resulting system is diagrammed in Figure 1 and a screenshot of the resulting application is presented in Figure 2.…”