NEAR: Visualizing information relations in a multimedia repository

Abstract

The NEAR (Navigating Exhibitions, Annotations and Resources) is a compact panel designed to help people navigating, searching and interacting in an information repository by visualizing implicit data relations such as sharing, reference and similarity. It is implemented on AVIRE, an online multimedia repository. AVIRE supports semi-structured collections (exhibitions) containing various resources and annotations. Its users are encouraged to contribute, share, annotate and interpret resources. Similar to the act of adding items into shopping carts in the e-commence applications, a user's acts of searching and organizing and interpreting data in AVIRE are considered as evidence of the user's preferences. The design process of NEAR was guided by several design moves analyzed from literatures. It implements new navigation and communication approaches that support discovery of relations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.