The Galaxy of News system embodies an approach to visualizing large quantities of independently authored pieces of information, in this case news stories. At the heart of this system is a powerful relationship construction engine that constructs an associative relation network to automatically build implicit links between related articles. To visualize these relationships, and hence the news information space, the Galaxy of News uses pyramidal structuring and visual presentation, semantic zooming and panning, animated visual cues that are dynamically constructed to illustrate relationships between articles, and fluid interaction in a three dimensional information space to browse and search through large databases of news articles. The result is a tool that allows people to quickly gain a broad understanding of a news base by providing an abstracted presentation that covers the entire information base, and through interaction, progressively refines the details of the information space. ...

The information presented in a document often consists of primary content as well as supporting material such as explanatory notes, detailed derivations, illustrations, and the like. We introduce a class of user interface techniques for fluid documents that supports the reader's shift to supporting material while maintaining the context of the primary material. Our approach initially minimizes the intrusion of supporting material by presenting it as a small visual cue near the annotated primary material. When the user expresses interest in the annotation, it expands smoothly to a readable size. At the same time, the primary material makes space for the expanded annotation. The expanded supporting material must be given space to occupy, and it must be made salient with respect to the surrounding primary material. These two aspects, space and salience, are subject to a negotiation between the primary and supporting material. This paper presents the components of our fluid document techniques and describes the negotiation architecture for ensuring that the presentations of both primary and supporting material are honored.