Department of Software TechnologyVienna University of Technology
Department of Software Technology
The cover of a book, the title, type of binding, the shape of the binding (brand new versus well-used and almost torn apart), the size of the book, color and other properties of an item on the shelve contain a wealth of information that most people are accustomed to and able to interpret intuitively. Thus it is easy for us to gain an intuitive overview of the contents of a library and the type of information present. The libViewer system provides an intuitive user interface to a digital library by providing a graphical interpretation of metadata. Documents are assigned a physical representation template such as books, binders, papers etc., with further metadata such as language, date of last reference etc. being encoded by a set of additional metaphors such as the thickness of documents, dust, fingerprints, logos and spiderwebs.