5
or application boundaries as is often the case in today’s
application-oriented work environments.
To control the information that goes into such portals a
ZOIL UI offers different direct manipulation techniques.
For example the user can manually assign items or item
collections to a portal by using a pick, drag and drop
interaction as an equivalent to copying in today’s desktop
metaphor. Furthermore dynamic queries [4] can be used to
formulate search queries on the information space (e.g.
desktop and web search) that automatically fill the portal
with the result set of information items. Figure 6 illustrates
how metadata like “Year” and “Persons” could be used to
search for DVDs in the information space and to iteratively
specify the desired items. In this example a range slider is
used to specify the desired years of publication.
Furthermore an incremental keyword search is used to find
all DVDs with a certain cast member by typing the first
letters of the person’s name.
A further way to formulate complex queries is the approach
of “nested information visualization”. This approach
enables the user to select arbitrary rectangular regions in the
information landscape or in portals (e.g. with a bounding
box, see figure 4) to create a new portal within the existing
portal that only contains the items from the selected region.
As suggested by Perlin & Fox in [31] portals can also be
used like the “magic lenses” of Bier et al. [9] to temporarily
or persistently view the content of a portal with different
visualizations and filter criteria. Figures 4 and 5 show how
a rectangular region of a map visualization is selected and is
transformed into a portal displaying all documents within
the selected region in a scatter plot.
Using the information landscape to create and manage
multiple portals enables the user to create persistent views
on arbitrary subsets of the information space dedicated to
the user’s typical information needs or current activities.
For example the user could create a portal that is
prominently positioned on the information landscape and
that contains a zoomable table view of recent emails similar
to today’s inboxes in email clients. Figure 3 shows a
screenshot of a ZOIL-based work environment for
document management which contains six different portals
to access documents: A person-oriented access is provided
by the floor plan below “Persons” which allows exploring
the documents of an author according to the location of the
author’s office. The calendar visualization on the top of the
screen positions the documents according to their creation
and modification date and allows a time-oriented zoom into
their content or to keep track of recently received
documents. Furthermore the user can use the world map
under “Location” to zoom into scientific papers according
to the geographic location of a conference (see figure 4).
Further visualizations ranging from hierarchical treemaps
[7] to social networks [14, 33] or zoomable tables [19] can
be integrated into the information landscape by
downloading them as modular “plug-ins” as it is known
from today’s web browsers. Thereby it is important to
notice that information items in ZOIL are not located at a
Figure 3. A ZOIL-based work environment for document management
(The dotted boxes illustrate the semantic zooming in the information landscape).
(4 pagine)
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