One of the departures from the almost standard
keyword search approach are those group of companies developing
visual search techniques. Some common visual search approaches include: •
Tree traversal – A folder is opened and inside the display of that folder are further sub-folders. The folders are searched in a specific order, exactly once, in a
systematic manner. This tree traversal approach relies on the naming of folders to provide a rich enough indication as to what is contained in the next folder or level of folders. •
Taxonomy navigation – A taxonomy (or
topic map) is the classification of things or concepts, as well as the principles underlying such classification. In KM software, taxonomies are often used as a way of visually structuring the available information by tagging it with relevant topics and visually represent them as folders and sub-folders inside the taxonomy. Users can then navigate the taxonomy and select the topic, or combination of topics (
faceted search), to perform the search on. •
Tag cloud search – Once text data has been tagged with certain topics it can be visually represented as a Tag Cloud, where the importance of each tag is represented as a font size and/or color. This way you can identify and pick the most prominent topics. •
Matrix/
heat map search – The classification of information into topics facilitates
visualization and
analysis of the information flow. A combined topic search can be presented as values in a Matrix, and a Heat Map is a
graphical representation of that data, presented in colors. ==Examples==