Tag Cloud Editing System Based On Rigid Body Dynamics

Tag cloud, also known as text cloud or word cloud, is currently one of the most popular methods for visualizing text data due to its efficiency and aesthetics on visualization results. With the growing of the popularity of tag cloud, user's needs have further upgraded from the original "one-click generation" to "customization". Therefore,tag cloud editing tools came into being, providing users with simple yet powerful tools for customizing tag cloud and saving users from tedious work. However, previous works usually adopt global updating strategy to produce compact and overlap-free tag cloud after user's editing. But this global updating strategy will always generate results with significantly changed layout in response to user interactions, thus making users hard to understand the effect of the interactions.Being aware of the above issues, this work mainly focuses on the user's requirements of friendly response to interactions. After designing a proper technical solution and the development of the framework, we introduce a tag cloud editing system based on rigid body dynamics, where users can smoothly edit a tag cloud without any mutations on the global layout for customized tag cloud.After the analysis of technical solution and framework design, we incorporate the rigid body dynamics, which studies the movement of systems of interconnected bodies under the action of external forces,into our system. In the system,each single word is regarded as a rigid body with mass and shape. When user edits the tag cloud, the movement of each word is constrained by different types of forces that are applied to itself, thus this system provides users with not only quick response but also a continuously changing tag cloud. In our system, the adjacent relationships between words are well preserved, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in testing section and show the reliability of our technical solution with compact results.After a period of more than one year of development and improvement, the system has been tested under a variety of human computer interaction environment, including computer and multi-point touch screen, and users can manipulate tags to customize their own tag clouds, showing that this system is very stable and robust,and is helpful in customizing tag cloud.