Supporting multiple perspectives and direct manipulation for visualizing and operating structured data using configurable two-way mapping

Advances in computer technology and the growth of internet made a huge amount of information easily accessible to information users. With increases in information, users rely heavily on computer technologies to handle that information concurrent with improvement in information transmission and delivery technologies is the development of tools to help people cope with the added volume of information. However, information processed by computers is frequently stored and organized for the computer's rather than for the user's convenience. This computer-friendly information is often formalized, structured, and regular. For example, information stored in a database is normalized and indexed so computers can efficiently access, process, and retrieve it. Manipulating such formal/prescriptive representations is not natural for people. Instead, people frequently sort items by rough notions of association or categorizations. One natural organizational process has been found to center around manipulations of objects in spatial arrangements. Using visual cues and spatial proximity, people change the categorizations of and relationships between objects. Without the help of indices or perfect memory, people can still interpret, locate, and manipulate the information represented by the items and the higher-level visual structures they form.; The research approach presented in this dissertation takes the visualization techniques and spatial arrangements that people naturally use as a model for systems to help people understand and manage structured information. These techniques have been incorporated into a visual interface for manipulating structured data called VITE.; VITE provides a two-dimensional workspace where information is visualized, and can also be manipulated. The system enables configurable visualizations of structured data sets—data made up of multiple attribute values, such as frames or objects in a knowledge base or rows in a relational database. VITE includes a direct manipulation interface for graphically editing the structured data. The ease of editing visual mappings and switching perspectives reduces the commitment to a fixed visual structure. This allows the salient characteristics to change over time as the user discovers new requirements in their current task or identifies new uses for the information.