Towards Visual Support for Document Navigation Through Multidimensional Catalogues

The catalogue metaphor is in wide-spread use for information systems which divide large document collections into subcategories to support browsing and searching [Marchionini 95]in these collections. In most catalogue applications the document categories are structured in a hierarchical way. The semantic organization of the catalogue's hierarchies plays a crucial role for the navigation efficiency and also for the effectiveness of the catalogue-oriented browsing user interface as a document exploration tool. The primary design goal of hierarchical catalogue categorizations is to create a comprehensive, memorable and convenient semantic organization of information relevant to the users ' tasks and information needs. Unfortunately, as the number of categories in one-dimensional catalogue applications increases, the difficulty to classify a document into a certain category increases as well. Furthermore, if a document’s content is to be associated with multiple categories, a user interface based on a single tree structure of categories, as it is implemented in many of today's internet and file system browsers, is not suited for navigation or browsing of the multidimensional catalogue because the positioning of a document in the navigation hierarchy does not express the full multidimensional catalogue context of the document