Designing a view for visually representing information coherence in a document set

Abstract

The majority of the world’s information is contained in textual records that describe specific domain information. The truth value of the information contained in these records is open for scrutiny. During the development of the National Indigenous Knowledge Management System (NIKMAS) system to capture and preserve indigenous knowledge, it was discovered that there was sometimes a coherence between the descriptions of the knowledge. It is proposed by the paper that a visual representation of the coherence of indigenous knowledge in a selected knowledge set would enable the user to make a decision about the possible truth value of the set. The aim of this paper is therefore to present an interface design for visually representing the coherence of information in a document set. In order to ensure that a rigorous process is followed, the design science research paradigm is suggested as appropriate research approach. In addition to interface design, a process for demonstrating and evaluating the design is also provided. The design presented in this paper assumes that the size of the document set is limited to not more than 50 documents