CHI 96 Workshop: HCI and the Web, Position Papers
Helping users locate information and alleviating disorientation are the key to enabling useful work on an exponentially growing Web. Three strategies have traditionally been employed to help users find their way in Internet information spaces: a-priori organisation of information in hierarchies such as in Gopher, search facilities like those of WAIS, and hyperlinks as in the World Wide Web (WWW).
On standard WWW servers, the hyperlink is the only structuring facility available, leading to the "World Wide Spaghetti Bowl" (to quote Robert Cailliau). Hierarchical structures can be simulated using menus of links, but maintaining these is difficult (and rapidly becomes a nightmare for hundreds and thousands of documents) and structural links are not readily distinguishable from standard associative links. WWW would benefit from an orthogonal concept of hierarchical structure.
Similarly, search facilities in WWW are not standardised. Search engines are typically bolted on to a standard Web server and their interfaces vary widely. There is also usually no scope definition for searches: it is not possible to narrow the scope of a search to specific parts of a server or widen it to multiple servers.
Techniques from information visualisation can be used to present graphical overviews of information spaces. However, visualisations of the WWW today are, in general, limited to maps of one-way hyperlinks, due to the lack of bivisible links, additional structuring facilities, and standardised meta-information.
Finally, the current Web is predominantly read-only -- servers provide and users browse. Better user and group access mechanisms are needed as well as online editing tools. This leads into the whole area of support for communication and collaborative work in the wider sense.
At Graz University of Technology in Austria, we are developing Hyper-G, a Web server which provides solutions to many of these problems. In particular, Hyper-G has facilities for managing and structuring large collections of information and provides interactive document and link editing, bidirectional hyperlinks, hierarchical structuring, extensive meta-data, and fully integrated search facilities.
His research interests include network information systems, hypermedia, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, and virtual reality. He holds a B.Sc.(Hons) in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of York, England and an M.Sc. in Technical Mathematics from Graz University of Technology, Austria, where he is currently completing a Ph.D.
Having lead the Harmony project (the Unix/X11 client for Hyper-G) for several years, he is currently project leader for the VRweb VRML viewer and is pursuing research in the field of information visualisation. He teaches short courses on Hyper-G and graduate-level university courses on Human-Computer Interaction and Multimedia Information Systems.
CHI 96 Workshop: HCI and the Web, Position Papers