An intelligence analyst often needs to keep track of more facts than can be held in human memory. As a result, analysts use a notebook or evidence file to record facts learned so far. In practice, the evidence file is often an electronic document into which text snippets and hand-typed notes are placed. While this kind of evidence file is easy to read and edit, it provides little help for making sense of the captured information. We describe Entity Workspace, a tool designed to be used in place of a traditional evidence file. Entity Workspace combines user interface and entity extraction technologies to build up an explicit model of important entities (people, places, organizations, phone numbers, etc.) and their relationships. Using this model, it helps the analyst find and re-find facts rapidly, notice connections between entities, and identify good documents and entities to explore next.

Retyping text phrases can be time consuming. As a result, techniques for copying text from one software application to another, such as copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop are now commonplace. However, even these techniques can be too slow in situations where many phrases need to be copied. In the special case where the phrases to be copied represent syntactically identifiable entities, such as person names, company names, telephone numbers, or street addresses, much faster phrase copying is possible. We describe entity quick click, an approach that reduces both the amount of cursor travel and the number of button presses needed to copy a phrase.

An advanced visual interface system is presented for fluid interaction in a personal digital library system. The system employs a zoomable planar representation of a collection using hybrid continuous/quantum treemap visualizations to facilitate navigation while minimizing cognitive load. By providing both fluidity and a means of reading documents within the same visualization, the system obliterates the traditional boundary separating the acquisition of materials from their use. In addition, the system provides a means of streamlining and largely automating the addition of new documents into a collection. The system is particularly well suited to user tasks which, in the physical world, are normally carried out by laying out a set of related documents on a physical desk — namely, those tasks that require frequent and rapid transfer of attention from one document in the collection to another. Discussed are the design and implementation of the system as well as its relationship to previous work.

We present two techniques that make document collection visualizations more informative. Icon abacus uses the horizontal position of icon groups to communicate document attributes. Ghost icons show linked documents by adding temporary icons and by highlighting or dimming existing ones.

This paper presents icon abacus, a space-efficient technique for displaying document attributes by automatic positioning of document icons. It displays the value of an attribute by using position on a single axis, allowing the other axis to display different metadata simultaneously The layout is stable enough to support navigation using spatial memory.

An advanced visual interface system is presented for fluid interaction in a personal digital library system. The system employs a zoomable planar representation of a collection using hybrid continuous/quantum treemap visualizations to facilitate navigation while minimizing cognitive load. By providing both fluidity and a means of reading documents within the same visualization, the system obliterates the traditional boundary separating the acquisition of materials from their use. In addition, the system provides a means of streamlining and largely automating the addition of new documents into a collection. The system is particularly well suited to user tasks which, in the physical world, are normally carried out by laying out a set of related documents on a physical desk - namely, those tasks that require frequent and rapid transfer of attention from one document in the collection to another. Discussed are the design and implementation of the system as well as its relationship to previous work.

The Instant Bookplex (IB) system includes a zoomable user interface (ZUI) for navigating through a spatial representation of a document collection. This ZUI supports extended reading in the collection using semantic zooming, graphical presentation of metadata, animated transitions, and an integrated reading user interface. IB helps users find and re-find documents, choose good documents to read next, and navigate between documents.

Software tools, including Web browsers, e-books, electronic document formats, search engines, and digital libraries are changing the way that people read, making it easier for them to find and view documents of interest. However, we observe that while these tools provide significant help with relatively short-term reading projects involving small numbers of documents, they fall short of supporting readers who are engaged in longer-term reading projects, in which a topic is to be understood in-depth by reading many documents. These readers need to find and manage many documents and citations, remember what they have read, and prioritize what to read next. In this paper, we describe a software tool designed to facilitate in-depth reading. This tool is a document collection browser that supports reading tasks that take place over days, weeks, or longer. The browser includes a zoomable user interface that helps the reader see the details of a document corpus in context. We describe the browser’s design and the design principles that motivated it.