Brian Kelly wrote;
> I mentioned HotSauce in a talk on metadata I gave yesterday at the OMNI
> Seminar. I described using HotSauce as like watching Star Trek, seeing
> metadata fly past rather than stars. I was asked later what the point of
> graphical visualisation of metadata was. I suggested that a 3D
> user inteface could provide a more usable user inteface (and compared the
> 2D desktop metaphor we are familiar with with the command line interface
> we used to have). I also suggested that extra clues could be provided
> by the use of colours, say, rather than textual descriptions.
This is something we've been giving some thought to here in sunny (at
the moment, anyway!) Newcastle, both with HotSauce and VRML...
At the moment, I'm not convinced that an MCF fly through REALLY shows
you anything of much use (although demo's like Andy's for eLib, and
bits and bobs we've done here are still useful, of course), but it
possibly points to a way forward...
Obvious problems at the moment include;
data overload
large sites often display as little more than a mass of labels
no real notion of structure
other than being able to see the 'children' of a page change colour
when you select it...
It would be useful, for example, to be able to display some form of
tree diagram, whereby the labels are actually joined together in some
fashion
poor navigation
I'm not sure what moving graphically through a mass of labels gives
me. I'd like more control over the view, allowing such features as
spinning the model around to look at it in section. As well as this,
greater exaggeration of depth would help, as there is very little
real sense of progression 'down' or 'through' at the moment...
The main advantages would come in improvements to display options and
searching.
In order to truly make use of more metadata than the name of
the web page, we need better capabilities to control the manner in
which each label displays. This would include such capabilities as
colouring all pages by values in a defined meta tag (or use data
pulled from elsewhere -- filesize, or date last modified from an SSI,
for example). Imagine the value, for example, of a webmaster being
able to highlight all pages written by a single individual, or all
pages including a certain keyword in their meta tags...
I'd like easy access to this kind of control, and I'd also like to be
able to display basic information about a page by right-clicking on
it's label. This might include the META contents of the HEAD area,
for example...
With additions such as these, a pretty (but, to me at least, fairly
useless) gadget becomes a useful tool...
And now, out of interest, has anyone found MCF site maps USEFUL, and
if so how, why, and where's the URL so we can all have a peek...?
Paul
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Paul Miller
Graphics & GIS Advisor, University Computing Service
University of Newcastle, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle
upon Tyne NE1 7RU. tel (0191) 222 8212/8039, fax (0191) 222 8765
e-mail [log in to unmask] WWW http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~napm1/
[log in to unmask] http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~ngraphic/
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