The Circlesegmentview: a User Centered, Meta-data Driven Approach for Visual Query and Filtering

Some of the main challenges of the Web are problems related to the user and his interaction with an information-retrieval system. People with different educational, social, cultural and economic backgrounds use the Internet to gather information or to search for knowledge. Information-seeking systems like Web Search Engines should help the users with this task. The information-seeking process is covered in computer science by various fields of research like Usability Engineering, Information Visualization or Information Retrieval. The development of a visualization called 'CircleSegmentView' (CSV) will demonstrate the user centered design process of such an information seeking system. The purpose of this visualization is to serve as a dynamic query interface for a system called VisMeB (Visual Meta-data Browser), which is engineered at the Human-Computer Interaction workgroup at the University of Konstanz (Germany).