A model for the visual representation of the coherence of facts in a textual document set

Abstract

A large amount of information is contained in textual records, which originate from a variety of sources such as handwritten records and digital media like audio and video files. The information contained in these records is unstructured and to visualise the content of the records is not a trivialtask.In order to visualise information contained in unstructured textual records, the information must be extracted from the records and transformed into a structured format.

This research aimed to visualise the coherence of facts contained in textual sources in order to allow the user who make use of the visualisation to make an assumption about the validity of the textual records as a set. For the purpose of the study, it was contemplated that the coherence of facts contained in a document set was indicated by the multiple occurrences of the same fact over several documents in the set.

The output of this research is a model that abstracts the process required to transform information contained in unstructured textual records into a structured format and the visual representation of the multiple occurrences of facts in order to support the process of making an assumption about the coherence of facts in the set. This assumption enables the user to make a decision.based on the coherence theory of truth.about the validity of the document set.

The modelprovides guidance and practices for performing tasks on similar textualdocument sets containing secondary data. The development of the model was informed by a phased construction of three specific software solution instantiations.namely an initial information extraction, an intermediate visual representation and a final information visualisation instantiation. The final solution instantiation was demonstrated to research participants and was evaluated as well. A pragmatic design science research approach was followed in order to solve the research problem. In conducting the research an adaption of the Peffers et at. (2006) design research process model was followed.

The result of the research is a model for the visual representation of the coherence of facts in a textual document set. Expert review of the model is added through a process of peer review and academic scrutiny by means of conference papers and a journal article. It is envisaged that the results of the research can be applied to a number of research fields such as Indigenous Knowledge, History and Law.