Welcome to NIRVE

The purpose of NIRVE (NIST Information Retrieval Visualization Engine) is to allow you to visualize and manipulate a set of documents resulting from a query to a search engine. The query is characterized by a set of keywords. NIRVE will let you consolidate these keywords into a smaller set of concepts and then will organize the documents into groups, called clusters, based on the documents' concept profiles. You can inspect individual documents and clusters. You can also suppress viewing of selected documents and clusters so as to concentrate on items of greater interest.

NIRVE is brought to you by the Visualization and Virtual Reality Group of NIST. Send questions to John Cugini.

• NIRVE slides: Project overview
• NIRVE User Guide
• Current NIRVE distribution
• NIRVE pictures: Gallery of NIRVana
• Architecture Overview: Process/Data Diagram
• Papers:
  • Evolution of NIRVE design: Postscript (as published) or a somewhat updated HTML version. This paper also contains a brief review of and references to several other novel interfaces for viewing search results.
    J. Cugini, S. Laskowski, M. Sebrechts, "Design of 3D Visualization of Search Results: Evolution and Evaluation", Proceedings of IST/SPIE's 12th Annual International Symposium: Electronic Imaging 2000: Visual Data Exploration and Analysis (SPIE 2000), San Jose, CA, 23-28 January 2000.
  • Evaluating NIRVE;
    M. Sebrechts, J. Vasilakis, M. Miller, J. Cugini, S. Laskowski, "Visualization of Search Results: A Comparative Evaluation of Text, 2D, and 3D Interfaces", Proceedings of SIGIR'99, pp. 3-10, eds. M. Hearst, F. Gey, and R. Tong, 22nd International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Berkeley, California, August 1999.
  • J. Cugini, "Presenting Search Results: Design, Visualization, and Evaluation", Proceedings of the Information Doors -- Where Information Search and Hypertext Link workshop, May 30, 2000, San Antonio, Texas (held in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext and Digital Libraries conferences).
  • Early paper: Document Clustering in Concept Space;
    J. Cugini, S. Laskowski, C. Piatko, "Document Clustering in Concept Space: The NIST Information Retrieval Visualization Engine (NIRVE)", CODATA Euro-American Workshop on Visualization of Information and Data, Paris, France, June 1997.
  • Early paper on Visualization for Document Retrieval;
    J. Cugini, C. Piatko, S. Laskowski, "Interactive 3D Visualization for Document Retrieval", Proceedings of the Workshop on New Paradigms in Information Visualization and Manipulation , ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '96), Rockville MD, November 1996.