Embracing semantics in zoomable user interface

Abstract

In the Information Retrieval (IR) field the majority of research up to now approaches all questions in terms of semantic tagging, indexing and feature extraction. Although this is a fundamental step to design any IR system, we believe that also an efficient human machine interface (HMI) can significantly improve the retrieval rate success at the end-user side. In particular, Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) are becoming popular in many applications and devices, thanks to their advantages in terms of usability and appeal to the public. In this paper we propose what we called a "Semantic ZUI", a traditional ZUI enriched with semantic engines that work behind the scenes and design features in order to provide a seamless experience of filesystem browsing. Since users are becoming both consumers and producers of huge amount of untagged content we explore the ZUI potentials by introducing features that focus on multimedia content. We set up the first version of a fully working demo environment with the aim to stimulate the debate in the IR community from the end-user experience point of view.