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It
was quickly recognised that users need assistance to access the plethora
of websites, news groups, bulletin boards, ftp sites etc. available
on the Internet. There has been a continuous effort to provide visual
aids to understanding the nature of the Net itself.
Early
solutions to the problem of information location, such as search applications
(GOPHER, Archie, Veronica etc), bookmarks and link indexes etc, were
soon overwhelmed by the sheer exponential growth of available material
and users' demands for more efficient and customisable solutions.
Theorists,
practitioners, technologists and entrepreneurs have instigated improvements
on old systems and suggested new solutions. Improvements to search engine
functionality, for example, have been continuous. Unfortunately even
the best of these, such as Google,
inevitable lag behind the growth of available content and all require
specialised knowledge to use effectively. They too often seem incapable
of finding things that you know are there... or of helping users
to distinguish which sites are likeliest to be what they're looking
for. Whilst all search engines rank their findings, there is no commonality
in the criteria upon which they do so. Some rank by order of greatest
number of correspondences between search terms and metatags or the appearance
of the terms in the site text, others on the basis of payment, whilst
others rank on number of other sites that link to the found sites.
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A
detail from a KartOO search.
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One
intriguing example, KartOO, billed as a meta-search engine,
stands out both by virtue of its graphic presentation and the
method by which found-site relationships are highlighted. KartOO
is the result of three years of research carried out by team headed
by Laurent Baleydier. Their research focused on the optimization
of systems that collect, analyze, organize and release structured
and unstructured data as well as on graphic interfaces and their
ergonomics. The resulting cartographic interface presents found
sites as 'islands', ranked according to their relevance to the
query, varying in size depending on the size of the corresponding
site. Links between sites are expressed as lines connecting sites.
Related terms drawn from the presented sites scatter the field.
When the user mouses over them, the sites that contain them pulse.
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| The
start screen for
PubMed,the
National Library of Medicine's database. |
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detail from a 3D view. |
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Visual Net
creates
a map of Internet sites by subject, and allows users to
either search in a 2D or 3D interface. In either interface,
proximity denotes the relationship between subjects. In
the 2D view, an architectural metaphor sees each subject
area denoted as a room, size indicating the volume of resources
available for any subject area. In the 3D view, sites are
represented as building, with size and height denoting the
volume and popularity of the site. Related sites are shown
in neighborhoods, allowing fast navigation to the desired
information In both views users can leave visual landmarks
to allow them to return quickly to neighborhoods of interest.
Customisable icons represent the age, popularity and link
density of sites.
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 Successful
user interface metaphors tap into a reservoir of bodily feeling on the
part of the user and successfully exploit our embodied knowledge. The
problem of disembodied users is that we ordinarily think of user interface
design as if the users were disembodied minds when they are not.
Tim
Rohrer, Metaphors
We Compute By: Bringing magic into interface design'
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A
project which has looked beyond the more or less disembodied 'point
and click' interface is German-based ART+ COM's Terra-Vision
(T-Vision). Harking back to the ground breaking work produced by Ray
and Charles Eames through the 50s and 60s, and in particular their
animated film 'The Power of Ten', T-Vision is designed around a more
corporeal user interface and a panoptic point of view.
Founded in 1988, ART+COM is an interdisciplinary group concerned
with the integration of computer technology, communication and design.
It brings together specialists from the arts, science and the IT industry.
T-Vision is essentially an interface to information available over
the Internet through an earth visualisation interface.
T-Vision's
specific concept of seamless links between different levels of detail
allows the continuous zooming from a global view down to recognisable
features of only a few centimeters in size. On the virtual globe any
kind of geographically related data can be visually incorporated (e.g.
biological, sociological, economic etc). It demonstrates coordinated
global data retrieval in a way that the WWW only hints at. The user
rolls a beach-ball sized trackball, and a globe of the world presented
on the screen, rolls correspondingly. The image is made up of a patchwork
of satellite and aerial photos. The user can zoom from the macro space
view of the world down to individual streets and locations - in fact
one can zoom into the Art+Com office, and look through a video camera
pointing out the window, and see real-time video action.
T-Vision can utilise the entire Internet, drawing on dispersed databases
for its images, so that the globe is continually updated. Because
of the impossibility of locally storing and constantly updating all
the high resolution data necessary for such visualisation application
the T-Vision project is based on the concept of a transparent and
worldwide ATM-broadband networked data bank. By approaching a geographical
region the system automatically establishes an ATM connection to the
server which provides the most up-to-date and highest resolution data
required for the current field of view. This data is integrated 'on
the fly' in the users system.
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 Most
"search" boxes are not full-text search -- they actually only search
the "keyword index" page, which is not itself shown. The Keyword list
is built by automated guesswork and looking for defined keywords,
which no one uses. No wonder the Search engines so often return no
results. The web standards for retrieval paths are very poor, almost
nonexistent, compared to the traditional ToC and Index.
Michael
Hoffman, Enabling
Extremely Rapid Navigation in Your Web or Document
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