Author: Markus Stobbs, ext 1238
Whenever content is taken from free-form web pages and turned into a
database-enabled website, questions inevitably arise about how to deal with
and display hierarchical and relational data. I have come to that crossing
in the road as I browse through the Gallery thinking about visualization
metadata. Let me paint a few scenarios and get your feedback on which one
you think our audiences will prefer. The pages involved in these scenarios are:
The user searches for a visualization using the keywords "atlantic squall".
The search results page lists the hits with thumbnail images, titles and
descriptions, similiar to what we see today at
http://www.scd.ucar.edu/vets/vg/Severegallery.html.
However, it is a listing
of hits to specific visualizations which met the search criteria, not a
listing of research projects like we currently have. If several
visualizations within the same research project met the search criteria,
they will each be listed separately. Both the project title and
visualization title will be listed for each hit. The user clicks on the
title or thumbnail and gets a visualization detail page of the record for
that specific visualization. A "related visualizations & research"
link on
the detail page will take the user to a project detail page which contains
all content and visualizations for the project. It will look similiar to
http://www.scd.ucar.edu/vets/vg/GATE/GATE.html
but the layout will be
different due to the nature of building the project detail page based on a
standard template.
Same as Scenario 1, except the search results are grouped by research
project. If there are 3 visualization hits from one project, and 5
visualization hits from a second project, the search results will have only
2 listings instead of 8. Each listing would show the project title and the
visualization titles that were hits in that project. Only the first
visualization hit thumbnail would be shown in the interest of collapsing
results into projects to make the browsing experience more efficient. The
user could click on the visualization title to go directly to the
visualization detail record and avoid the larger context of the project. Or
the user could click the project title and get a project summary page with
an overview about the project, and thumbnails and descriptions listed for
all visualization hits for that project. The same "related visualizations
&
research" link as in Scenario 1 would be on the project summary page to
get
to the exhaustive project detail page.
Same as scenario 2, except clicking the project title would take the user
directly to the project detail page instead of the intermediary project
summary page. At this point, the user would be looking at the larger context
of the project and would not necessarily know which visualizations were
hits, although we could explore some form of hit highlighting on the project
detail page.