Hyperlinked Comic Strips for Sharing Personal Contexts

Comic strips can be used as a style of visualization on a human–computer interface because they can represent a wide variety of affairs with contexts or time series. This paper describes two systems for sharing personal context as comic strips: ComicDiary and Comic-FOAF-Viewer. Both the systems depict personal experiences or profiles including personal relationships in their comic strips and hyperlinks among related comics based on other characters in the story. ComicDiary allegorizes individual episodes that happen during touring exhibitions by creating a comic from a user’s touring records accumulated from personal guidance systems and environmental facts, e.g., social events. For example, a ComicDiary might show a user’s personal diary during a Japanese academic conference. The comic describes where the conference was held, the most interesting presentations, what happened, and so on. Exhibitions are places visited by people of all generations. Comic representation of a personal diary with amiable expressions fits such places. The comic strip is automatically generated, composed of 12 frames, and shown as a diary. Users can view their diaries at information kiosks located at exhibition sites. Friend of a Friend (FOAF), which is an XML/RDF application for expressing personal information and relationships, has attracted attention from Web developers because its files can describe human-centered networks such as Social Network Service (SNS). Current FOAF visualization tools utilize graphs or tables; however, it is difficult to represent a variety of relations. Comic-FOAF-Viewer aims to represent the multifarious relations and personal information that FOAF has to offer for surfing interfaces in FOAF networks.