Publishing evolving metadocuments on the web

Abstract

Metadocuments are documents that consist primarily of references to other documents, and elements within them. Our active browsing web visualization tool generates an evolving series of navigable metadocument snapshots over time. The granularity of browsing is shifted, from documents to the finer grained information elements, which are metadocument constituents. The program conducts expression-directed automatic retrieval of information from the web. It performs procedural visual composition of the information elements to form spatial hypertext. The user can express interest and design intentions through direct manipulation interactions with the visualized information elements. As prior versions of the tool lacked the capabilities of save and load, they were entirely process-oriented. The metadocuments existed only as transient states. This paper is an early report on our new metadocument authoring and publishing capability, and its potential uses. Saved metadocuments can be published on the web. Once published, they can serve both as static navigable metadocuments, and as the jumping off point from which the information space represented by the collected elements can continue to evolve.