The Hyperbolic Brower as a Tool for Information Visualization, Discovery, and Retrieval on the Web and Enterprise Intranets

Abstract

Knowledge workers frequently need to locate task-relevant information quickly and efficiently through the Internet or their enterprise intranets. The ability to visualize how information is structured and organized is often a key to timely and efficient information discovery and retrieval. The traditional interface used for browsing Web sites has been a hierarchical, tree-like presentation, such as the Windows Explorer file/folder browser. From a user interface design standpoint, an attractive alternative to this type of browser is the hyperbolic browser, which is a focus + context technique for visualizing and browsing large amounts of hierarchical inter-related information. A hyperbolic view display efficiently represents hierarchical and associative information in a static or dynamic visual format using a relatively small display space. This paper discusses the characteristics of the hyperbolic browser, provides a real-life use case scenario to illustrate its application, and suggests avenues for future research and development.