FacetZoom: A Continuous Multi-Scale Widget for Navigating Hierarchical Metadata
period of projectJanuary 2006 till April 2008
involved peopleProf. Dr.-Ing. Raimund Dachselt,
Dipl.-Medien-Inf. Mathias Frisch and
Dipl.-Medien-Inf. Markus Weiland
Faceted Media Browsing (FacetZoom, FacetFolders, MAMBO)
Abstract
Media objects can be described and arranged by means of faceted meta data, such as artist, genre, time, publisher etc. Future Personal Information and Media Management applications should be able to support a number of tasks, among them: gaining an overview about a large collection, browsing, searching specific items, or filtering media objects. The goal of this project was to develop basic techniques for faceted media browsing and to apply them in sample applications. We developed the basic UI techniques FacetZoom and FacetFolders and a facet-based media management tool called MAMBO.
FacetZoom
Faceted browsing is a promising way to incrementally re-fine data sets. Current approaches do not scale well in terms of screen size and have shortcomings in interacting with hierarchical facets. This paper introduces FacetZoom, a novel multi-scale widget combining facet browsing with zoomable user interfaces. Hierarchical facets are displayed as space-filling widgets which allow a fast traversal across all levels while simultaneously maintaining context. We contribute both a seamless continuous navigation and a quick tap-and-center interaction. Two prototypes are de-scribed which successfully apply the space-structuring wid-get to continuous, sampled data and an information collec-tion. A formative user study of the latter indicates that the interface scales well to small screens. FacetZoom is versa-tile and offers consistent searching and browsing behaviors in a multitude of applications and device settings.
MAMBO
The Mambo interface was developed for browsing large personal music collections on mobile devices. Songs, albums or other data can be visually arranged according to different aspects. Aspects are metadata facets such as name, artist, time, or genre. A novel zooming widget (FacetZoom) constitutes the basic metaphor and permits a consistent way of searching, browsing and filtering data without the need for text input. The problem of scrolling long item lists is eliminated with FacetZoom. It can be seen as a means of subdividing a set of data items according to a filter dimension into different, hierarchically contained levels of detail. A continuous multi-scale and a discrete click-and-center navigation was developed which is especially suited for mobile devices. We also conducted a user study, investigating the first prototype under PDA and UMPC display conditions using two design variants.
FacetFolders
Facet Folders are a visualization and interaction concept for filtering collections of personal data. Although visually derived from the ubiquitous folder hierarchies of file managers, Facet Folders explicitly expose the faceted metadata used for filtering. Facet Folders can be arranged into persistent hierarchies, enabling the construction of dynamically updating views across multiple facets. If demands change, the hierarchy can be easily rearranged.
Related publications
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Facet Folders: Flexible Filter Hierarchies with Faceted Metadata
CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05-10, 2008).
CHI '08, ACM, New York, NY, pp. 3735-3740.
Downloads: Paper (1244KB), Additional Poster (3156KB)
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Mambo: A Facet-based Zoomable Music Browser
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (Oulu, Finland, December 2007).
MUM 2007, ACM, ISBN 978-1-59593-9, pp. 110-117.
Downloads: Paper (1809KB), Additional Poster (1073KB)