Tech Report HCIL-2004-05

Kang, H., Shneiderman, B. (February 2004)
Personal media exploration: A spatial interface to user-designed semantic regions
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 17, 3 (2006), 254-283.
HCIL-2004-05, CS-TR-4668, ISR-TR-2005-51

Graphical mechanisms for spatially organizing personal media data could enable users to fruitfully apply their mental models. This paper introduces Semantic Regions, an innovative way for users to construct display representations of their mental models by drawing regions on 2D space and specifying the semantics for each region. Then users can apply personal ontologies to personal media data using the fling-and-flock metaphor. This allows photos (or other personal media) to be dragged to the display and automatically grouped according to time, geography, family trees, groups of friends, or other display representations of mental models. The prototype implementation for Semantic Regions, MediaFinder, was refined based on two small usability tests for usage and construction of user-defined mental models.