Visual User Interfaces for Information Exploration

Abstract

The next generation of database management, directory browsing, information retrieval, hypermedia, scientific data management, and library systems can enable convenient exploration of growing information spaces by a wider range of users. User interface designers can provide more powerful search techniques, more comprehensible query facilities, better presentation methods, and smoother integration of technology with task. This paper offers novel graphical and direct manipulation approaches to query formulation and information presentation/manipulation. These approaches include a graphical approach to restricted boolean query formulation based on generalization/aggregation hierarchies, a filter/flow metaphor for complete boolean expressions, dynamic query methods with continuous visual presentation of results as the query is changed (possibly employing parallel computation), and color-coded 2-dimensional space-filling tree-maps that present multiple-level hierarchies in a single display (hundreds of directories and more than a thousand files can be seen at once). (Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-577)