About the Software

Projection Explorer (PEx) is a Java based tool which can be used to create and explore visual representations of document collections, helping the user to understand their contents. In this representation, each document is identified as a circle on a plane. If two circles are close, the content of the documents they represent are similar. If the circles are distant the documents are uncorrelated.
Using this graphical representation it is possible to identify, inside a document collection, groups of similar documents, and the frontiers between groups of documents, being possible to verify the correlation between different areas of knowledge. Besides, PEx makes it possible to select groups of documents, and create for such groups labels which identify the topics being mainly discussed on these groups.
PEx can also be used to analyze other types of multidimensional data. For that it is only necessary to provide a way to calculate dissimilarities between the instances of data. It is a part of the doctorate of Fernando Vieira Paulovich (oriented by Rosane Minghim) at Mathematical and Computer Sciences Institute (ICMC) of the University of São Paulo, São Carlos/Brazil.
Roberto Pinho has built some tools concerning his research interests into PEx and contributed to its development.
Pedro Vilela has also contributed to PEx development.
It is freely available for educational purposes.

Publications

JOIA, P.; PAULOVICH, F. V.; COIMBRA, D.; CUMINATO, J. A.; NONATO, L. G.. Local Affine Multidimensional Projection. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2011). ISSN: 10772626. DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2011.220