Visible Threads: A Smart VR Interface to Digital Libraries

The importance of information as a resource for economic growth and education is steadily increasing. Due to technological advances in computer industry and the explosive growth of the Internet much valuable information will be available in digital libraries. This paper introduces a system that aims to support a user's browsing activities in document sets retrieved from a digital library. Latent Semantic Analysis is applied to extract salient semantic structures and citation patterns of documents stored in a digital library in a computationally expensive batch job. At retrieval time, cluster techniques are used to organize retrieved documents into clusters according to the previously extracted semantic similarities. A modified Boltzman algorithm [1] is employed to spatially organize the resulting clusters and their documents in the form of a three-dimensional information landscape or "i-scape". The i-scape is then displayed for interactive exploration via a multi-modal, virtual reality CAVE interface [8]. Users' browsing activities are recorded and user models are extracted to give newcomers online help based on previous navigation activity as well as to enable experienced users to recognize and exploit past user traces. In this way, the system provides interactive services to assist users in the spatial navigation, interpretation, and detailed exploration of potentially large document sets matching a query.