1. ¹Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A.
2. ²Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A.
3. ³Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, U.S.A.

Correspondence: Hyunmo Kang, Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A. E-mail: kang@cs.umd.edu

Received 23 June 2006; Revised 31 July 2006; Accepted 10 November 2006; Published online 25 January 2007.

Abstract

Networks have remained a challenge for information retrieval and visualization because of the rich set of tasks that users want to accomplish. This paper offers an abstract Content-Actor network data model, a classification of tasks, and a tool to support them. The NetLens interface was designed around the abstract Content-Actor network data model to allow users to pose a series of elementary queries and iteratively refine visual overviews and sorted lists. This enables the support of complex queries that are traditionally hard to specify. NetLens is general and scalable in that it applies to any data set that can be represented with our abstract data model. This paper describes the use of NetLens with a subset of the ACM Digital Library consisting of about 4000 papers from the CHI conference written by about 6000 authors, and reports on a usability study with nine participants.

CR categories: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentations]: User Interfaces – graphical user interfaces (GUI), interaction styles, prototyping.