| Harald Reiterer Professor, Computer and Information Science University of Konstanz |
Mathias Heilig Ph.D. student University of Konstanz |
| Marc H. Scholl Professor Department of Computer & Information Science University of Konstanz |
Users of today’s digital libraries are confronted with information spaces that are rapidly growing in quantity, heterogeneity, relationality and dimensionality. Therefore, more effective tools are required to facilitate the exploration and search in these information spaces. MedioVis is a flexible application for the visual exploration of such data that is especially designed for users without prior professional experience in search, retrieval or visualization.
To provide users with a satisfying search experience, different views of the data space are available, and the system supports analytical and browsing oriented exploration strategies through the use of multiple coordinated visualizations and a consistent and supportive interaction design. Furthermore, visualizations based on well-known and straightforward concepts (e.g. tables or scatter plots) were intentionally used and combined. These visualizations provide visual filtering mechanisms (e.g. table filters or zooming into a region of a scatter plot) to support a natural method for query formulation and refinement. To avoid information overload, detail information can be accessed by continuous semantic zooming (e.g. into a table cell).
The project was launched four years ago and still undergoes iterative development and evaluation cycles. To gain continuous end-user feedback and insights in to real interaction behavior, MedioVis has been running for over three years in the media library of the Library of the University of Konstanz. It allows users an alternative approach, alongside the standard online catalog system, to search through more than 70,000 multimedia objects such as movies or documentaries. A particular challenge was the seamless integration of services, both catalog and Web services such as library accounting or GoogleMaps. By directly interlinking these with the catalog objects, the Mashup and Web 2.0 concepts are addressed from a whole new direction. Furthermore the information space is enriched with additional, heterogeneous data from the Web such as images or video trailers. To allow access to these objects, the interaction design was revised by comprehensively integrating zoomable user-interface concepts.
http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/MedioVis
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mediovis/
Handout (PDF)
Presentation (PDF)