Merz: Creating personal and shared spaces on the World Wide Web

Merz is an environment which supports knowledge work, personal information management and collaboration on the WWW. As a user gathers information by browsing and querying, a local database of metadata is built, serving as a basis for creating Merzbaus: visual representations of documents and links. The user interface is characterised by filtering and semantic zooming. Instead of having to classify objects into hierarchies and folders, users can successively add keywords to the metadata records for objects and links and create multiple, filtered views of information. Categorised objects can be moved to parallel, more organised Merzbaus, e.g., corresponding to specific projects. Users can personalise Merzbaus by rearranging icons, creating links, and by entering hand-written marks. Collaboration is supported by means of publishing Merzbaus to a WWW-MOO server for other users to access. Merz is implemented in JAVA.