| Enterprise information management (EIM) has traditionally demanded ever-more powerful user-interface for non-programmer users and hence driven the progression of interface technology from one generation to another. This need becomes more compounded today as information technology is used in all aspects of an enterprise and every manager becomes a prospective end-user of the enterprise information systems. The user-interface must be able to interpret the underlying information resources for the users and present them in a synthetic and intuitive way--an analogy is the visual examination technology in the field of medicine (e.g., CATSCAN). What would the next generation user-interface be like?; We submit that the recent progress on scientific visualization and metadata technologies has paved the way for repeating the same success of medical visualization for enterprise information management. In particular, the system-possessed metadata could afford turning still-images of conventional visualization into dynamic segments of interpreted illustration of data--i.e., the integral of knowledge and visualization over time--for EIM users. We call this vision the four-dimensional (4-D) information visualization, where the fourth dimension is the time-elapsed integral of 3-D visions generated by the system. This research explores the concept and develops an execution model to provide new capabilities to users not found in previous user-interface approaches, especially for enterprise information management activities. The achievement of 4-D information visualization adds a new dimension to user-interface design, that of dynamism. Therefore, dynamism here is defined as knowledge-generated space-and-time segments of visualization for communications in the human-computer interface. Dynamism possesses four characteristics, each of which is also a goal for the new interface technology: (1) continuity in the logical presentation of views and information resources, (2) synthesis of information contents represented in terms of multi-media and multi-modal association, (3) multiplicity of disparate systems or regimes in the sources of information, and (4) time-space field of physical representation in terms of user-interface metaphors and visual language. In addition to the developed conceptual model, and execution methods, a prototype for a visual global query system was developed and documented as proof for the concept. |
