[Sigia-l] Visual shopping

[Ziya Oz]

Dmitry Nekrasovski:

> If the shopping experience in question can benefit from 2D spatial
> mapping of items and progressive disclosure of detail as the user
> zooms in, I don't see why not. I can't think of one that meets these
> criteria off the top of my head, but it's possible.

I am actually working on designing an architecture at the moment for an
enterprise project wherein a gigantic SharePoint repository (many dozen
gigabytes) is so deeply nested and unwieldy that it has become a bottleneck.
Not only 2D navigation in it is insufferable but it sometimes prevents
people saving files in certain contexts because SP freaks out with the
length of filepaths in deeply nested directories.

I considered many varieties of abstraction on top of the SP layout to allow
people to navigate this maze without regard to physical file structure. One
of them was a zoomable UI. However, because of the complexity of the
relationships in this SP repository, a simple node-linking won't suffice. So
I coupled that with ROLAP that brings in multi-dimensional facet-like
navigational relativity. I'm pretty sure the fluidity of the cubed UI can be
guaranteed against *current* size of the DB, but this has to be very
scalable. Hence my curiosity about applications in largish contexts. ;-)

----
Ziya

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted,
they would have asked for a faster horse." -- Henry Ford