Multiple representations of navigable worlds CODATA Euro-American Workshop Visualization of Information and Data

INTRODUCTION: DESIGN METHOD Our work focuses on the design of visualization and interaction techniques for large information spaces. Our design approach is based on a conceptual study of users and their tasks [4]. To face the diversity of users and tasks we adopt an interaction-centered approach and focus on navigation tasks. Based on the characteristics of navigation, we develop ergonomic criteria that need to be satisfied by the designed navigational techniques. One of the criteria, representation multiplicity, is crucial in order to accommodate the diversity of needs. We illustrate representation multiplicity with our own system, VITESSE [7, 10] that runs on the WWW. In the design method, the last step before coding, is software architecture modeling. In the context of VITESSE, we demonstrate the suitability of our architectural model PAC-AMODEUS for representation multiplicity.