Elastic lists for facet browsers

Abstract

In the context of current web and personal information management developments, we argue that facet browsing is an increasingly important interface paradigm. However, current implementations neglect two important aspects of metadata distributions: the relative proportions of metadata occurrences and the unusualness of this proportion compared to a global profile. Based on focus & context visualization techniques, we enhance facet browser user interfaces with "elastic lists" to make the resulting weighted metadata profiles visually accessible and navigable. The principle is currently developed and tested in several domains.