The National Science Digital Library (NSDL), launched in December 2002, is emerging as a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education. As a part of this extensive project, the GetSmart system was created to apply knowledge management techniques in a learning environment. The design of the system is based on an analysis of learning theory and the information search process. Its key notion is the integration of search tools and curriculum support with concept mapping. More than 100 students at the University of Arizona and Virginia Tech used the system in the fall of 2002. A database of more than one thousand student-prepared concept maps has been collected with more than forty thousand relationships expressed in semantic, graphical, node-link representations. Preliminary analysis of the collected data is revealing interesting knowledge representation patterns.

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Relations extracted from over 600 000 PubMed abstracts are available for retrieval and visualization at http://econport.arizona.edu:8080/NetVis/index.html.

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To make good decisions, businesses try to gather good intelligence information. Yet managing and processing a large amount of unstructured information and data stand in the way of greater business knowledge. An effective business intelligence tool must be able to access quality information from a variety of sources in a variety of forms, and it must support people as they search for and analyze that information. The EBizPort system was designed to address information needs for the business/IT community. EBizPort's collection-building process is designed to acquire credible, timely, and relevant information. The user interface provides access to collected and metasearched resources using innovative tools for summarization, categorization, and visualization. The effectiveness, efficiency, usability, and information quality of the EBizPort system were measured. EBizPort significantly outperformed Brint, a business search portal, in search effectiveness, information quality, user satisfaction, and usability. Users particularly liked EBizPort's clean and user-friendly interface. Results from our evaluation study suggest that the visualization function added value to the search and analysis process, that the generalizable collection-building technique can be useful for domain-specific information searching on the Web, and that the search interface was important for Web search and browse support.

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Visualization techniques have proven to be critical in helping crime analysis. By interviewing and observing Criminal Intelligence Officers (CIO) and civilian crime analysts at the Tucson Police Department (TPD), we found that two types of tasks are important for crime analysis: crime pattern recognition and criminal association discovery. We developed two separate systems that provide automatic visual assistance on these tasks. To help identify crime patterns, a Spatial Temporal Visualization (STV) system was designed to integrate a synchronized view of three types of visualization techniques: a GIS view, a timeline view and a periodic pattern view. The Criminal Activities Network (CAN) system extracts, visualizes and analyzes criminal relationships using spring-embedded and blockmodeling algorithms. This paper discusses the design and functionality of these two systems and the lessons learned from the development process and interaction with law enforcement officers.

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