Visual Navigation within Conceptual Spaces

Finding objects like music albums or wines in large databases is an inherently difficult problem, especially if users do not know exactly what they are looking for. We propose the use of Conceptual Spaces to lay out items spatially and provide a set of techniques for Zoomable User Interfaces to enable navigation within these spaces. Conceptual Spaces place items along meaningful dimensions, so users can find the items they are looking for, and similar items are placed near to each other. We implemented a prototype to enable navigation within a collection of music albums, and believe that the concept has the potential to generalize to all kind of real world items like pictures, food, wines or books that can be described by perceptual qualities as time, color, emotion or