Katy Borner

Indiana University

Designing and Evaluating 3-Dimensional Collaborative Information Spaces

4-5pm Wednesday 25th July, 2001

Room 203

Today, large amounts of human knowledge are available online - in the form of texts and images, but also as audio files, movies, software demos, etc. The accelerating rate of scientific and technical discovery causes new topics to emerge at an increasing rate. To make this volume of knowledge accessible and manageable for mankind, it is critical that effective interfaces are developed which facilitate the collaborative access, annotation, and evaluation of knowledge. Giventhat domain experts are often spread out in space and time zones, consultation and collaboration will need to proceed remotely instead of face-to-face.

This talk will introduce and discuss the design and evaluation of different 3-dimensional information spaces

- The LVis--Digital Library Visualizer visualizes retrieval results from two different databases the Science Citation Index Expanded accessed via the Web of Science and the Dido Image Bank, Department of the History of Art, Indiana University. It uses Latent Semantic Indexing and clustering techniques to extract semantically meaningful clusters. A modified Boltzman algorithm is used to layout citation data or images in 2-D. LVis comes with a 2-D Java and 3-D CAVE interface.

- The iUniverse project aims to create a 'Collaborative Information\Universe' for Indiana University. Active Worlds technology is extendedto create shared virtual learning environments. Currently, the iUni world hosts a 'Natural Disaster Area', a 'Science House', a 'QuestAtlantis' portal to different theme parks for kids, an 'Art Cafe', and a 'Virtual Collaboration Area'.

- The 'twin worlds' i-Palace and i-Garden are utilized to create and evaluate a shared resource of online documents for faculty, staff, and students at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.