Visual Information Seeking in Digital Image Libraries The Visible Human Explorer.pdf

Visual Information Seeking in Digital Image Libraries: The Visible Human Explorer Chris North , Ben Shneiderman , and Catherine Plaisant Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory Department of Computer Science Institute for Systems Research University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA {north, ben, plaisant}@ /projects/hcil/ Footnote: This chapter uses extracts from the following paper, and is expanded to report on recent work: C. North, B. Shneiderman, and C. Plaisant. User-Controlled Overviews of an Image Library: A Case Study of the Visible Human. Proc of ACM DL96 - Conference on Digital Libraries, pg 74-82, March 1996. ABSTRACT This chapter presents the Visible Human Explorer user interface, developed at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland at College Park, for remotely accessing the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human digital image library. With the interface, users can visualize the library, browse contents, locate data of interest, and retrieve and zoom on desired image details. The interface presents a pair of tightly coupled views of library data: an overview of the overall search space, and a preview of high-resolution images available for retrieval. To explore, the user sweeps the views through the search space and receives smooth, rapid, visual feedback of contents. Desired details are automatically downloaded over the internet from the library. The interface software is completely functional (runs on Sun Workstations) and freely available for public use, at: /. We also present several human-computer interaction design principles used to create the Visible Human Explorer interface, describe how these were applied to the design, and discuss issues in employing these techniques in user interfaces for other information collections. These principles are direct manipulation, visual information seeking, query previews, and multiple tightly coupled views. We illustrate thes