NIRVE Control

Overview

NIRVE Control is a "menu" window used for overall control and mode-setting. Information about the various options can be found during execution by clicking on the little question-head at the left end of each line. Operations include database query, concept control, opening and closing clusters, filtering results, viewing, and finally summarization, and quit.

Categories of operation are represented by color as follows: yellow is used for "help" buttons, blue for normal operations, green for querying the document database, and light red for warnings and drastic operations. Click here to see a picture of the control panel.

1. Explain controls

There are three buttons, one for each set of NIRVE operations. When you click on a button, a message window will pop up to explain the general purpose of the corresponding window. To delete the message window click on the Close button at its bottom.

2. Database Queries

These buttons are used to retrieve a new set of documents from the text database.

The New Query button allows you to retrieve a new set of documents from the text database. A query window pops up which you use to specify the new set of keywords to be matched and the number of documents to be returned. The window is initialized with the keywords of the immediately preceding query.

The Query History menu displays all queries submitted so far during the current session. You can select any of these earlier queries, edit it, and then submit the resulting altered query.

3. Concept operations

The New Concept button allows you to create a new concept: a word you define, with which you associate a color and a set of keywords. The documents are organized according to the subset of concepts they contain. A concept can be specified as disjunctive (constituent keywords are ORed) or conjunctive (constituent keywords are ANDed). Typically disjunctive concepts would be used for synonymous keywords (e.g. TORNADO = tornado or twister) and conjunctive concepts for proper names (e.g. RR = Ronald and Reagan).

The Delete Empty Concepts button deletes all current concepts which do not contain any keywords.

4. Cluster operations

The Open Clusters button opens all clusters in the global display. This causes the titles of the documents in each cluster to be displayed on a 2D screen projecting out from the cluster icon.

The Close Clusters button closes all open clusters in the global display, which reverts to the global view of cluster icons only (no cluster contents).

5. Filtering

Every document has a user-controllable value which signifies the user's judgment of that document: good, bad, or, unsure. The initial value is unsure. You can display any subset of these categories, as indicated by the check-buttons. Note that when you change the value of a document, the display is not immediately affected. If you wish to keep the same categories displayed (e.g. display good and unsure, suppress bad), simply press the Re-apply button, after marking documents with the desired values.

6. View mode

You can use the buttons to select the current view mode for the Document Space window. A brief description of these modes follows. Please see Operations in Document Space for more detail. Additionally, the Reset view button resets the view to its original setting, in which the entire array is visible.

Spin Mode: The mouse is inactive; the entire icon display rotates at a constant speed around its natural axis.
Move Mode: You can use the mouse to move the display into any desired position. When the spaceball is used, view mode is automatically set to Move.
Pick Mode: You can use the mouse to see the titles, or the complete text of documents. Also, you can mark documents and clusters with a value reflecting your judgment of their usefulness. Finally, you can have an icon of interest swing around to the front for closer viewing.

7. Spin

These buttons are used to control the speed and direction of spin of the document space display in the obvious way. The Stop button sets the view mode to pick. Any of the other buttons sets the view mode to spin.

7A. Spaceball sensitivity

This is an optional entry that appears only when NIRVE is enabled for spaceball capability. The buttons allow the user to control independently the sensitivity of rotations and translations performed via the spaceball. Clicking on the + button indicates higher sensitivity, the - button, lower sensitivity.

8. NIRVE State

You can save and load (restore) the current state of NIRVE, namely the current set of documents, keywords, concepts, and keyword to concept mapping. You must supply the prefix of a filename which is used to hold the information. The standard filename suffixes '.doc' and '.kcm' are automatically appended to the name. When saving, you simply supply a prefix and the state is written to that filename. When retrieving, you will be given a choice of existing files in the current directory whose names end in '.kcm'.

9. Major operations

The Weblist button creates an HTML summary of the set of documents organized into the clusters as currently displayed on-screen. This summary is displayed using Netscape.

The User Guide button requests Netscape to display this User Guide.

The Quit button does just that.