Tools Designed Specifically for Information Space Organization

LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE: This report has been submitted for publication outside of the University of Colorado and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Technical Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of the University prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). Abstract Information retrieval has traditionally been concerned with extracting isolated facts from large knowledge bases. There are times, however, when users have a different goal – they seek to understand the structure of the data as a whole, so that they have a conceptual framework into which individual facts can later be assimilated. Today's search tools do not explicitly support this. They typically provide only a query-response mechanism for obtaining isolated facts, one at a time. Users are forced to form a mental model on their own, inferring the broader structure from these disconnected details. Tools specifically designed to help users organize large information spaces are proposed. Such tools will raise the level of abstraction, so that the categories of mental perception can be stated, examined, and reasoned about in their own right. The user's subjectivity will be honored; different people often have different views of the same data, and they want to organize it according to their own individual perceptions. The need for such tools, and the properties designers should strive for, are discussed. A prototype that demonstrates the validity of this kind of tool is presented.