Overview of mSpace interaction approach for presenting exploratory search particularly in the audio domain by using slices, preview cues, and user-determined organization of information from high-dimensional space

Russell, Alistair

schraefel, m.c.

Smith, Daniel Alexander

Wilson, Max L.

English

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

Introduction, Exploratory Search, Special issuce, Communications o... file://localhost/Users/mc/Pictures/mspace-cacm.html1 of 3 19/4/06 15:51Preprint of article in Communications of the ACMVolume 49, Number 4 (2006), Pages 47-49mSpace: improving information access to multimedia domains with multimodal exploratory searchm.c. schraefel, Max Wilson, Alistair Russell, Daniel A. Smith If you do not know much about classical music, how do you discover what you might like? The firstport of call for most people is to Google "classical music." This returns a list of links to sites thatprovide textual descriptions of terms or times in the classical music domain, or sometimes sites that sellclassical music, or review particular pieces, or feature beginner's guides that list "must hear" works [1]. While these are all useful sources of information, they do not enable direct assessment by or access tothe content of the domain itself. mSpace (mspace.fm) is an interaction model [2] and software framework [6] that brings together a variety of mechanisms to improve access to information bysupporting multiple ways of exploring the information itself.The mSpace model conceptualizes information as a set of dimensions within a domain. In order tomanage these high-dimensional spaces, we represent only a subset at a time, called a "slice." These arearranged from left to right, in columns, creating a hierarchy, where the left-most column is the top levelof the hierarchy and the right-most is at the bottom. Instances associated with a dimension are populatedinto a column. The accompanying figure shows the selection of Baroque in the Era column has restrictedthe instances that appear in the Composer column to those composers of the Baroque era.The slice is dynamic: it can be altered by rearranging, adding, or subtracting dimensions, enablingindividuals to determine how they wish to organize the domain to support their interest. For instance,someone interested in piano pieces can replace the Era dimension (default first column) withArrangement. Selecting Piano will then mean that the following column—Composers—will show onlythose composers who created works for Piano. Providing these kinds of manipulations is whatMarchionini refers to as support for "slicing and dicing" [3] information for user-determinedexploration.mSpace represents slices within a multicolumn "faceted" (see Hearst in this section) spatial browser thatpresents persistent contextual information around items of interest (see the figure). This approachfacilitates "information triage" [4]. People can quickly browse the domain, see information about aselected item, see which other items are in the same area, and easily add the selected item to a collectionspace for later attention.The terms in a given dimension (Baroque, symphony, serenade), nicely organized though they are, maymean nothing to a neophyte explorer. mSpace provides preview cues [5] to help address this problem. Apreview cue is a lightweight mechanism that provides a multimedia preview of the area currently beingtriaged in the interface. In the classical music example, hovering over cues associated with Baroque willtrigger pieces that are from that period. In this way, preview cues are distinct from current music storesoftware, which provides audio samples only with a given piece. As well, preview cues foreground theexploration of content through examples of the content itself—in this case, the music—rather than theinformation about it, like Composer, Period, and so on.Our research with pr views cues has shown, perhaps not surprisingly, that by providing cues at thecategory rather than the instance level alone, people are significantly better able to explore a domain andmake selections within it [5]. At the system level, there are many methods to select the cues to associatewith a category: expert recommendations, collaborative filtering, feature detection, and even randomIntroduction, Exploratory Search, Special issuce, Communications o... file://localhost/Users/mc/Pictures/mspace-cacm.html2 of 3 19/4/06 15:51selection. Our own research suggests that even if the system uses only simple random selection to selecta preview cue within the set of available pieces for that category it is both highly effective and scalable.In other words, any valid preview cue is significantly better than no cue at all. To date, we have exploredthe use of preview cues for music and video; audio cues and video cues respectively. One of theadvantages of preview cues is they provide an additional dimension for exploration with low impact forscreen real estate requirements. This low screen usage for high value assessment has been particularlyhelpful when porting the mSpace interface to mobile devices (www.mspace.fm/mobile), where screenreal estate is highly constrained.mSpace is an interaction model and software framework that brings together a variety ofmechanisms to improve access to information by supporting multiple ways of exploring theinformation itself.The mSpace framework itself is built on Semantic Web technologies. The Semantic Web enablesdiverse, heterogeneous (that is, Web-type) resources to be reused in new contexts. Thus, an mSpace canpull together a variety of resources into new contexts by leveraging their associated semantics.Increasing numbers of Web resources, such as the Open Guides, blogs, and news RSS streams, publishtheir data as RDF. Other open sources such as Wikipedia can be easily translated into RDF—the W3Cstandard for mark-up language for semantic description of resources. With Semantic Web tools likemSpace, a source such as Wikipedia, when presenting information on Beethoven, can use either anmSpace about historical figures or a classical music mSpace featuring composers. These semantics alsosuggest that multiple mSpaces can be interconnected, to enable moving between domains as readily asmoving between dimensions within a domain. The heterogeneity of domains will, in the near future,enable people to choose information sources they trust to populate the interface.We also are integrating lightweight annotation/publishing methods to enable people to make commentson their discoveries and publish these comments so they too can add to information that can be exploredabout attributes of a domain. In the architecture, we are also investigating models from peer-to-peer totrackback for automatic publishing to an mSpace about relevant resources or for it to discoverappropriate resources.The purpose of mSpace is to improve access to information by supporting exploration of domains.mSpace does this by providing a variety of mechanisms—slice rearrangement, preview cues, collectionbuilding, information views, and contextual spatial displays—to let people determine how they wish toorganize the space to best support their focus of interest. The long game plan for mSpace is to evolveinto one of those interfaces that can both help discover these resources, bring them together dynamically,and enable a rich palette of mechanisms to explore and share the discoveries made on such expeditions.  References1. Green, A. Classical Music for Beginners, 2005; classicalmusic.about.com/.2. McGuffin, M.J. and schraefel, m.c. A comparison of hyperstructures: zzstructures, mSpaces, andpolyarchies. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Santa Cruz,CA, 2004). ACM Press, NY, 153–162.3. Marchionini, G. Information Seeking in Electronic Environments. Cambridge University Press, NY,1995.4. Marshall, C.C. and Shipman, F.M. Spatial hypertext and the practice of information triage. InProceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Hypertext (Southampton, U.K., Apr. 06–11, 1997). M.Bernstein, K. Øÿsterbye, and L. Carr, Eds. ACM Press, NY, 124–133;Introduction, Exploratory Search, Special issuce, Communications o... file://localhost/Users/mc/Pictures/mspace-cacm.html3 of 3 19/4/06 15:51doi.acm.org/10.1145/267437.2674515. schraefel, m.c., Karam, M., and Zhao, S. Listen to the music: Audio preview cues for exploration ofonline music. In Proceedings of Interact 03—Bringing the Bits Together (Zurich, Switzerland; 2003).6. Smith, D.A., Owens, A., Russell, A., and Harris, C. mSpace: Exploring the Semantic Web. A technical report in support of the mSpace software framework. Technical Report, ECS, University ofSouthampton, 2004; eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10359/.  FiguresFigure. The mSpace Explorer. A slice through the information space is shown withfour dimensions: Era, Composer, Form, Piece. The Form dimension is being draggedfrom the right of composer to the left, rearranging the slice.

A comparison of hyperstructures: zzstructures, mSpaces, and polyarchies.

Classical Music for Beginners,

Information Seeking in Electronic Environments.

Listen to the music: Audio preview cues for exploration of online music.

mSpace: Exploring the Semantic Web. A technical report in support of the mSpace software framework.

Spatial hypertext and the practice of information triage.

mSpace: improving information access to multimedia domains with multimodal exploratory search

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.103.3011

mSpace: improving information access to multimedia domains with multimodal exploratory search

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