4 Navigators : Space / Time / Text / Mind

Initial Idea

The main idea within the design of the GUI was, that a special interface is needed when historical content is presented. Historical content can, due to its spatio-temporal complexity, be hard to understand: artefacts could have been of importance during different periods of time: an archaeological artefact could have been produced at a certain time, different to the time of use and time of recovery or excavation. Place of production, place of use and place of excavation can be different. Therefore, the system had to be designed in a way where any object can have several attributes of the same type attached - a feature that is usually not implemented in standard content management systems. Presentation of multiple attributes has to happen in an easily understandable way. Therefore metascapes introduced the concept of navigators within the Heritage 4 framework; navigators, which may guide the user through the content and present content from one of four thematic perspectives. Basically, the screen is split vertically into two parts: the navigator area on the left hand side and the content area on the right hand side. Any object or collection of objects shown on the right side can be shown through one of the four navigators on the left hand side.

Navigators

Currently four navigators are implemented: Time, Space, Text and Mind.

Mind

The Mind Navigator is a dynamic node-edge presentation of content, where the currently selected object shows up in the centre of the canvas. Around it and connected by lines, objects in relation with the selected object are allocated. By clicking on a peripheral object, the latter is moved into the centre of the canvas and its relations are shown, the original object’s relations disappear. This navigator ensures via its dynamic character and intuitive way of presentation and user interaction a good understanding of relations between objects.

See a screendump of the Mind Navigator here.

Map

The map navigator shows the geographic attributes as point, line or polygon. The map navigator contains standard functions as zoom-in, zoom-out and pan. By clicking on a line - typically a road - objects allocated on the same road or within a given distance (buffer) can be revealed. By clicking on a polygon like for example a neighbourhood, objects within this neighbourhood will appear. Technically, the map navigator is either implemented with Google Maps, Google Earth or the Open Layers standard. The latter requires additional map data and orthophotos which Google currently supplies with free of charge.

See a screendump of the Map Navigator here.  

Time

The time navigator presents objects’ temporal attributes graphically on a timeline. The timeline shows the time on the horizontal axis, on the vertical, the objects’ temporal attributes are shown as either dots or lines. Both precise and unprecise points of time and periods can be shown. March 15th 1888 would be a precise point of time shown as a dot while January 1674 would be depicted as a line.

See a screendump of the Time Navigator here.

Text

The text navigator features an extended search which can be filtered by given criteria. The latter could be the content type (road, book, artefact, accession) or other types of data like for example colour or materiality. A temporal filter can limit the search results to a certain period which can be freely entered (for example 1880-1920) or be chosen from a list of historical periods and ages (like for example the iron age).

See a screendump of the Text Navigator here.