Mandala: An architecture for using images to access and organize web information

Abstract

Mandala is a system for using images to represent, access, and organize web information. Images from a web page represent the content of the page. Double-clicking on an image signals a web browser to display the associated page. People identify groups of images visually and share them with Mandala by dragging them between windows. Groups of image representations are stored as imagemaps, making it easy to save visual bookmarks, site indexes, and session histories. Image representations afford organizations that scale better than textual displays while revealing a wealth of additional information. People can easily group related images, identify relevant images, and use images as mnemonics. Hypermedia systems that use image representations seem less susceptible to classic hypertext problems. When image representations are derived from a proxy server cache, the resulting visualizations increase cache hitrates, access to relevant resources, and resource sharing, while revealing the dynamic access patterns of a community.