Several recent research systems have provided interactive three-dimensional (3D) visualisations for supporting everyday work such as file and document management. But what improvements do these 3D interfaces offer over their traditional 2D counterparts? This paper describes the comparative evaluation of two document management systems that differ only in the number of dimensions used for displaying and interacting with the data. The 3D system is heavily based on Robertson et al.’s Data Mountain, which supports users in storing, organising and retrieving ‘thumbnail ’ representations of documents such as bookmarked web-pages. Results show that our subjects were faster at storing and retrieving pages in the display when using the 2D interface, but not significantly so. As expected, retrieval times significantly increased as the number of thumbnails increased. Despite the lack of significant differences between the 2D and 3D interfaces, subjective assessments showed a significant preference for the 3D interface.

This report is broken down into four main sections, firstly giving the primary aims of the proposed research, followed by a review of background reading of present Information Visualisation (IV) techniques, which are categorised using an existing framework. This is followed by a description of the general visualisation problem we are concerned with plus a description of the specific area where such a visualisation could be of benefit. We then discuss the visualisation techniques that address situations that have the greatest similarity to our own problem, and explain why they still lack suitability for our purposes. Then, two prototypes that are under development are described, and the report finishes with a breakdown of proposed future work

Information Visualization (InfoVis) encompasses techniques of visualization that deal primarily with abstract data, that is, data for which the user has no preconceived mental model. This is in contrast to, for example, volume or flow data.

Scatter graphs (e.g. SPIRE Galaxies, Bead, VR-VIBE) are a popular medium for visualising spatial-semantic structures derived from abstract information spaces. For small spaces (i.e. less than one hundred nodes), such graphs can be an effective means of reducing high-dimensional information into two or three spatial dimensions. As dimensionality increases, representing the thematic diversity of documents using spatial proximity alone becomes less and less effective. This paper reports an experiment designed to determine whether, for larger spaces, benefits are to be gained from adding visual links between document nodes as an additional means of representing the most important semantic relationships. Two well known algorithms, minimum spanning trees (MST) and pathfinder associative networks (PFNET), were tested against both a scatter graph visualisation, derived from factor analysis, and a traditional list-based hypertext interface. It was hypothesised that visual links would facilitate users' comprehension of the information space with corresponding gains in information seeking performance. Navigation performance and user impressions were analysed across a range of different search tasks. Results indicate both significant performance gains and more positive user feedback for MST and PFNET visualisations over scatter graphs. Performance on all visualisations was generally poorer and never better than that achieved on the text list interface, although the magnitude of these differences was found to be highly task dependent. Keywords: information visualization, information retrieval, evaluation, pathfinder associative networks, minimum spanning trees 1.

The current form of the web has two major problems in supporting web navigation, the user's cognitive overhead and their disorientation. Solving these problems is an important issue in web navigation research. This paper reports on the current state of web navigation support, the navigation problems that remain and describes our ongoing research and development of interactive visualizations that aim to ease these problems. We discuss web navigation concepts, a user's characteristics and behaviours on the web, web navigation mechanisms and their problems, and interactive visualization schemes for web navigation.

Abstract. Most current Grid monitoring systems provide a visual user interface. With recent advances in multimedia capabilities in user terminals, there is a strong trend towards interactive, multi-modal and multi-platform visualization. In this paper we describe a multi-platform visualization architecture and a Web based service built upon it, which provides a view of the monitored Grid hierarchy, and the values of selected monitoring parameters for different Grid sites. We demonstrate the application on four platforms: a desktop Personal Computer (PC), a handheld PC, a Java-enabled new-generation mobile phone, and a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled mobile phone. 1

3D web software visualisation has always been expensive, special purpose and hard to program. In this thesis we present a framework for evaluating software visualisation media. The framework is then applied in the evaluation of the new “eXtensible 3D ” (X3D) open standard for web 3D graphics, to determine how suitable X3D is for use in a web-based software visualisation environment. Our evaluation is based on our experience of replicating a representative sample of software visualisation techniques which are common throughout the software visualisation literature in X3D. The evaluation finds that a large range of software visualisation techniques can be implemented in X3D, however, the development of these visualisations is very time consuming and no specific software visualisation features exist. Acknowledgments I would first just like to say that my Mum and Dad and have been great support over the past few years in completing this degree and without them the struggle

This article summarises the current state of research into multiple tree visualisations. It discusses the spectrum of current representation techniques used on single trees, pairs of trees and finally multiple trees, in order to identify which representations are best suited to particular tasks and to find gaps in the representation space, in which opportunities for future multiple tree visualisation research may exist. The application areas from where multiple tree data are derived are enumerated, and the distinct structures that multiple trees make in combination with each other and the effect on subsequent approaches to their visualisation are discussed, along with the basic high-level goals of existing multiple tree visualisations.

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This paper presents a case study of the development of a visualisation to represent and explore the relationships between multiple hierarchical structures, specifically botanical taxonomies. The case study outlines the visualisation's development from initial meetings with taxonomists, through the early visual sketches of their activities, and through to the prototype as it exists now after two rounds of usability testing. Qualitative user feedback was elicited from taxonomists who used the system, using standard techniques, taken from traditional usability methodologies such as direct observation, concurrent verbal protocols, video recording and software logs. Some difficulties and differences in the testing and stages of development arising from the Information Visualisation (IV) approach to the graphical display, as contrasted to a more standard Graphical User Interface (GUI), are noted and solutions proposed.