A Data Extraction and Visualization Framework for Information Retrieval Systems

In recent years we are witnessing a continuous growth in the amount of data that both public and private organizations collect and profit by. Search engines are the most common tools used to retrieve information, and more recently, clustering techniques showed to be an effective tool in helping users to skim query results. The majority of the systems proposed to manage information, provide textual interfaces to explore search results that are not specifically designed to provide an interactive experience to the users. Trying to find a solution to this problem, we focus on how to extract conveniently data from sources of interest, and how to enhance their analysis and consultation through visualization techniques. In this work we present a customizable framework able to acquire, search and interactively visualize data. This framework is built upon a modular architectural schema and its effectiveness will be illustrated by a prototype implemented for a specific application domain.