Abstract Navigation by Query in Virtual Worlds 1 Center for Mathematics and Computer Science(CWI)

Web-based 3D virtual environments suffer from the classic problem of users getting ’lost-in-cyberspace’. Apart from getting lost, it is hard for an average user to discover all that a specific world has to offer without spending considerable time exploring that world. In order to remedy this situation we propose navigation by query. The user interface for 3D virtual environments usually allows users to ’walk ’ around in the virtual world. Navigation by query augments this interface by allowing users to navigate a virtual world by means of querying its content. We present the concept of navigation by query and discuss the requirements for an implementation for a VRML based environment. Additionally we illustrate problems an implementation must solve by presenting a prototype implementation.

3D Gadgets for Business Process Visualization - a case study

Business visualization is becoming increasingly important, since managers recognize the power of human visual intuition in information-rich decision tasks. Nevertheless, despite its promises, 3D visualizations are far less common than one would expect. In this paper, we describe a case study where we took a 2D visualization of a business process as a starting point, for which we subsequently provided a 3D visualization. We introduce a small set of 3D visualization gadgets and associated behaviors, implemented in Java3D, that proved to be relatively complete for our case. For each of these gadgets and behaviors, we will discuss requirements and design trade-offs. The case study, which concerns an actual business process of the largest social security provider in the Netherlands, illustrates the usability of our gadgets and their associated behaviors, which include brushing, grouping, and (drill down) manipulation. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.2 [Computer Graphics]: Grap..

CWI at the TREC-2002 video track

this document, ve refer to the search collec- tion used in the TRO-2002 video track as h,e search, coIIec- io

A Taxonomy of Web Agents

In this paper we propose a taxonomy of web agents, which encompasses agents that provide a text-based interface to for example information retrieval services as well as avatarembodied guides that help visitors to navigate in virtual environments. Our taxonomy must be regarded as an instrument to delineate targets for research and the realization of prototype applications that demonstrate the usefulness of agent-based intelligence on the Web. In addition, we deploy our agent-taxonomy to establish the implications particular target applications have with respect to software architecture and computational resources. 1. Introduction There is a lot of interest and work in the research and development of agent technology with applications on the Web. Many types of web agents have been proposed in recent years, which range from domain-dependent agents, like e-commerce agents, information gathering agents, to function-dependent agents, like negotiation agents, cooperating agents. In addition..

ABSTRACT RAM: Array Processing over a Relational DBMS

CWI is a founding member of ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. CWI's research has a theme-oriented structure and is grouped into four clusters. Listed below are the names of the clusters and in parentheses their acronyms

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and their applications. SMC is sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). CWI is a member o

Exact matching in image databases

We believe there is a niche for exact sub-image searching in image databases. When only a sub-image is searched for, traditional image searching approaches fail because the sub-image features usually represent only a small fraction of the global image features. Said differently: it is difficult to find the sub-image in the global features. We present a new technique to find sub-images in a (possibly large) image database. The users articulate their interest in a sub-image, i.e. an object within an image, in a so-called precise multi-spot query. We search our spatially oriented color-based image database image-by-image for matches with this multi-spot query. 1