[Sigia-l] Re: Back to tabs

[Tim Ostler]

Although the lens idea is nicely evocative of those giant spectacles 
with slots for different lenses that opticians use, I think the idea of 
information filtering is perhaps a more precise analogy -- albeit a 
metaphor that doesn't mix well with tabs. It calls to mind some of the 
work on Movable Filters carried out by Ken Fishkin and Maureen Stone at 
PARC in the mid 90s.

Here's Fishkin and Stone's abstract:

" Traditional database query systems allow users to construct 
complicated database queries from specialized database language 
primitives. While powerful and expressive, such systems are not easy to 
use, especially for browsing or exploring the data. Information 
visualization systems address this problem by providing graphical 
presentations of the data and direct manipulation tools for exploring 
the data. Recent work has reported the value of dynamic queries coupled 
with two-dimensional data representations for progressive refinement of 
user queries. However, the queries generated by these systems are 
limited to conjunctions of global ranges of parameter values. In this 
paper, we extend dynamic queries by encoding each operand of the query 
as a Magic Lens filter. Compound queries can be constructed by 
overlapping the lenses. Each lens includes a slider and a set of 
buttons to control the value of the filter function and to define the 
composition operation generated by overlapping the lenses. We 
demonstrate a system that supports multiple, simultaneous, general, 
real-valued queries on databases with incomplete data, while 
maintaining the simple visual interface of dynamic query system"

from: "Enhanced Dynamic Queries via Movable Filters"
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing 
systems
Pages: 415 - 420   ISBN:0-201-84705-1

Tim Ostler