Visualizing Electronic Document Repositories: 
                Drawing Books and Papers in a Digital Library
                
                       Andreas Rauber, Harald Bina
       Department of Software Technology, Vienna University of Technology
             Favoritenstr. 9-11 / 188, A - 1040 Vienna, Austria
                      http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/ifs
                      {andi, harry}@ifs.tuwien.ac.at
                      
                      
Abstract:

While methods for retrieving documents from large information repositories have
improved a lot, presentation of the retrieved documents still leaves a lot to 
be desired. Important information on documents is usually presented as a textual
listing of available metadata attributes such as document size, author information,
date of creation, and so on. This requires the user to read and abstract from 
the presented meta-information.
In this paper we present our libViewer system, a Java-Applet interfacing 
with a number of servers to provide an intuitive metaphor-graphics based
representation of document repositories. Contrary to most other multidimensional
data visualization approaches we rely on  intuitive real-world metaphors to 
provide a visualization for untrained users rather than experts in special
interfaces. We introduce a set of metaphors and present two prototype systems
interfacing with Dublin Core metadata based repositories as well as the 
AltaVista search engine. We further provide a first usability evaluation based 
on comments obtained from users.


Keywords:
Information Visualization, Metaphor Graphics, Digital Libraries, Metadata, 
Document Databases, User Interfaces, Usability

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Andreas Rauber, Harald Bina: 
Visualizing Electronic Document Repositories: Drawing Books and Papers in a 
Digital Library
In: Proceedings of the 5. IFIP 2.6 Working Conference on Visual Database Systems 
(VDB5), May 10. - 12. 2000,  Fukuoka, Japan, Advances in Visual Information 
Management - Visual Database Systems, pp. 95 - 114, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Norwell, MA.