Exploring Music Artists via Descriptive Terms and Multimedia Content

This paper presents an approach to browse collections of web pages about music artists by means of descriptive terms and multimedia content. To this end, a user interface called Three-Dimensional CoOccurrence Browser (3D-COB) is introduced. 3D-COB automatically extracts and weights terms from artist-related web pages. This textual information is complemented with information on the multimedia content found on the web pages. For the user interface of 3D-COB, we elaborated a three-dimensional extension of the Sunburst visualization technique. The hierarchical data to be visualized is obtained by analyzing the web pages for combinations of co-occurring terms that are highly ranked by a term weighting function. As for evaluation, we investigated different term weighting strategies in a first user study. A second user study was carried out to assess ergonomic aspects of 3D-COB, especially its usefulness for gaining a quick overview of a set of web pages and for efficiently browsing within this set.