Mandala: An Architecture for Using Images to Access and Organize Web Informations

Mandala is a system for using images to represent, access, and organize web information. Images from a web page represent the content of the page. Double-clicking on an image signals a web browser to display the associated page. People identify groups of images visually and share them with Mandala by dragging them between windows. Groups of image representations are stored as imagemaps, making it easy to save visual bookmarks, site indexes, and session histories. Image representations aaord organizations that scale better than textual displays while revealing a wealth of additional information. People can easily group related images, identify relevant images, and use images as mnemonics. Hypermedia systems that use image representations seem less susceptible to classic hypertext problems. When image representations are derived from a proxy server cache, the resulting visualizations increase cache hit-rates, access to relevant resources, and resource sharing, while revealing the dynamic access patterns of a community. Most web software represents information textually. We use textual bookmarks and history lists in browsers, textual indexes and similarity metrics in search engines, and textual concept hierarchies in link taxonomies. Textual representations and organizations shape our experience of interacting with informationn13]. On the web, a selectable image is a link to another resource. Imagemaps link to multiple resources. In general, a selectable image contains more data than a typical string of selectable text and has the potential to provide more of an indication if the link is relevant and worth following. In many cases, images from a web page represent the content of the page. Even the images used for decoration, navigation, and advertisement often provide additional characterizations of a web site (although these can usually be recognized and suppressed). Web images may represent their context for many reasons. There is a rich history of using images to illustrate and illuminate