Next: 2. Visual Languages Up: thesis Previous: List of Figures Contents
1. Introduction
Humankind produces more information than ever. Yet it becomes increasingly difficult to stay informed or find the information one is looking for. ``Overnewsed and underinformed'' has become a common phrase. It is only natural to look for alternative ways to store, transmit, receive, and search for information. Although computers already play a dominant role in these processes it becomes apparent that written text, as convenient as it may be, poses a lot of problems and can not be considered the ultimate solution. This thesis discusses the multi-sensory language environment MUSLI as an alternative approach. MUSLI was first introduced by Maurer and Lennon in 1994 [LM94,Len94].
Chapter 2 gives an overview of visual languages and their features and also touches on design issues for visual languages and the difference between symbols and icons. Languages for augmented communication, artistic languages, as well as languages of academic interest are discussed in the following sections. Also, the original proposal for MUSLI is presented in detail in Section 2.9.
Chapter 3 introduces the fundamental underlying concepts of the new proposal for MUSLI. Together with chapters 4 and 6 this forms the core of the thesis. MUSLI concepts discussed are the movie metaphor and its implications (dynamics), libraries and user communities, alternative representations and the possibility of customization, abstraction, grammar and semantics, and how time is handled within MUSLI.
Chapter 4 describes the underlying structure and grammar of MUSLI languages. This structure provides semantics and helps for realizing sophisticated data mining, search, and navigation functionality. Different types of language objects are discussed: basic objects called actors, hierarchy building and grouping structures called compound objects, and relations which establish defined connections among objects.
Chapter 5 addresses some issues that MUSLI applications must deal with. Specifically it discusses how MUSLI documents are made accessible to readers.
Chapter 6 discusses MUSLI from the point of view of exploring and finding information within MUSLI documents. This chapter brings together the underlying concepts and language structure that are discussed in earlier chapters. It will be shown that MUSLI addresses a wide range of problems posed by todays flood of information.
Chapter 7 gives an overview of the MUSLI prototype that was created as part of this thesis. The prototype uses Macromedia's Director package and shows the basic functionality described in this thesis.
Next: 2. Visual Languages Up: thesis Previous: List of Figures Contents Arno Hollosi 2001-01-09