Fluid representations of information spaces - in context

Lynda
24 04 04

This note is inspired by some of the questions in Topia and by Katya's
presentation of Spectacle (leesklub 160403).  (Also the DELOS II user
i/f proposal piece where the question was only about
visualizing/navigating the catalogue.)

The underlying questions are 4:

How can you visualize to a user the complete "schema" of a collection
of something (be it an ontology, a library collection, an information
space).

How can you show information in a subset of this information space in
the context of its "position" (conceptual rather than spatial) in the
whole.

How do fluid representations of this help?

How can we show information on the "content" level together with
information on the "meta" level.  Katharina's encyclopaedia mockup
showed a representation of the meta-level which gave context for the
content-level presentation.  (Meanwhile not forgetting the fuzzy line
between content and meta, a la Guus and other "scruffies"...)

(I am ignoring 2D vs 3D deliberately.)

Existing interfaces:

  _V2 has an interface which flows as the user moves around - but it
  shows only nearest neighbours.

  Spectacle shows the navigation in a fluid way.

  Chanovsky had an interface which sort of showed concepts close by
  and as they got further away they go smaller and faded out.

  The hierarchy view in CMIFed does allow you to see focus and
  preserves context that can be used to navigate.  In some sense what
  I'm looking for, but there were so many levels for even trivial
  presentations that it didn't quite work.  In most of these (types
  of) interfaces there is a single focus.  (I think I even thought
  about a double focus in CMIFed a long time ago - but didn't get very
  far.

  Frank's Eisenstein mockup.  This is an excellent example of what I
  mean.  I recall it being at the content level. I can't remember if
  there is meta-level context or whether the user can directly
  navigate the meta-level.

What I'd _like_ to do is have a leesklub on May 7th and show as many as
these types of interface as I can.

I'm hoping that this, and previous, year's/s' CHI video(s) might
help.  Spectacle, _V2 demo, Eisenstein...

On the other hand, I probably don't have time to organise it before
May 7.

If you have any other good examples of the sort of thing I'm talking
about then feel free.  (I'll try to make my refs more reliable at some
point.)