Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reexamination Certificate
1999-09-15
2004-11-09
Alam, Shahid (Department: 2172)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S215000, C345S215000, C345S215000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06816175
ABSTRACT:
1 BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to means and a method executable by a computer system for navigation within a tree structure with leaf nodes representing arbitrary types of objects, i.e. of related data treated as a unit.
1.2 Description and Disadvantages of Prior Art
“The Information Age”, a fairly commonly heard expression these days, but one whose consequences seem to be ignored as frequently as it is used. There is no denying the fact that we are in the midst of a long term explosion of information that shows no signs of slowing down, or even accelerating less forcefully. The questions this fact raises are many, but one of the most significant, if not the most significant, is the question of organisation.
The Information Age has lived up to it's promise of “information at our fingertips”, but the sheer volume of the information available makes it nearly impossible to find any given set of specific information, much less navigate intelligently through the constantly growing sea of data. The additional question of attempting to somehow display information about the relations between various items, and the context of the item, adds still another level of complexity. When we start to look at large collections of related data, with additional information about context and relations (“Complex Knowledge Structures”)., one enters a territory even less navigable than the raw data—the additional information should help us understand the raw facts, but again the sheer amount of information overloads us and renders the putative assistance of context a hindrance.
The computer is that tool, and it has become the main ally in the quest to force some sort of order, or structure, onto the apparently endless chaotic mass of information. When one starts looking at new ways to order and present data using computers, then the question becomes one of ergonomics. To wit, how do we organise and display these complex knowledge structures so that humans can navigate through them with ease, find what they are looking for, and generally make sense of the information in context? How do we select appropriate data from the mass of information, and once we have found it, how do we allow the user to interact with it?
Based on this background the display of large amounts of information has been an active area of research in a diversity of areas since decades now. Work on man-machine interfaces, information retrieval, graph layout, cognitive science, virtual reality—each area concentrates on certain aspects or principles of the problem. Within the context of knowledge management, one has to deal with a widespread spectrum of information types: raw texts, structured texts, annotated information, partly automatically generated information entities, which obey yet unknown structural rules, relational and hierarchical meta information. Hence, the capabilities of information browsers or navigators can be measured by the degree they are able to handle some of the most important expectations like:
to display partly structured information of varying size
to ease the perception of the ordering of the information
to allow for interactive exploration of information spaces
To put it in different words: in this context where we discuss a mixture of human-edited information carriers (written text) and machine-generated structures (object hierarchies, descriptive labels i.e. “terms”), an information structure becomes only valuable by perception, not per se. The question remaining is: which aspects of this mixed information might be stressed to achieve optimal perception. In the following, we compare some recent work in cognitive science, graph layout, information retrieval and knowledge management by their respective modalities.
Y. Arens and E. Hovy, How to Describe What? Towards a Theory of Modality Utilization, Meeting of Cognitive Science Society, Cambridge, Mass Cognitive Science Society, p. 487-494, August 1990 describe a theory of modality utilization where they distinguish between three aspects of an information entity: the inner properties of the object, the properties of the class the object belongs to and the properties of a selected set of objects, i.e. the information to be discussed and residing in current focus.
These three aspects can be found in different designs of tree and graph browsers, graphical query languages, graphical information retrieval front ends, and general multimedia information systems. Prior to a more detailed analysis one can expect that all implemented systems will most radically differ by the chosen paradigm for their means of interactive exploration of information structures.
Information retrieval (IR) front ends like GUIDO and VIBE, proposed by Robert R. Korfhage and Kai A. Olsen, Information Display: Control of Visual Representations, Workshop on Visual Languages, IEEE Computer Society, p. 56-61, October 1991, provide a pre-structured information space to visualize document/document and document/term binary relations. The space is defined by (query) terms which span a certain geometry (e.g. a diamond-shaped panel with triangular segments). Document representations (small rectangles) are positioned to the segment where they have the greatest overlap with terms owning this segments Hierarchical information is hardly displayed for the sake of a conceptual strict layout paradigm. On the other hand it is well known that hierarchical organization approaches belong to the most powerful classification concepts conforming to a large extend with human way of thinking.
IR-system graphical user interface (GUI) designs based upon a 3D-space mostly concentrate on the display of the hierarchical aspect of information only. Systems using Cone-Trees, refer for instance to George G. Robertson and Jock D. Mackinlay and Stuart K. Card, Cone Trees: Animated 3D Visualizations of Hierarchical Information, Proceedings of ACM CHI'91 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 189-194, 1991, map term/document and other hierarchical relational information directly to a 3D layout algorithm. Interactive graphical operations like zoom and rotate provide means to gain an overview and inspect details. The design is centered around the user, who has to explore the (3D) space. As consequence and deficiency, the cognitive load is typically very high if one has to identify and compare properties for a certain set of objects.
Another specific technique suggested for the representation of complex knowledge structures, beloging to the same class exploiting the 3D space, is that of using the properties of hyperbolic geometry to provide a view that contains both an inherent focus (channelling user attention to some current node) and a context, i.e. information about the relationship between the current node and other nodes in the system, by navigating through a network of nodes.
Arbitrary data structures like entity-relationship models are typically mapped to a—more or less—specialized graph- or tree layout algorithm. The semantics of the relations is mapped to certain aspects of the graph layout. In GraphLog, refer for instance to Stuart K. Card and George G. Robertson and Jock D. Mackinlay, The Information Visualizer, An Information Workspace, Proceedings of ACM CHI'91 Conference on Humanfactors in Computing Systems, p. 181-188, 1991, one can even formulate structural/semantic queries by drawing objects, thus the user of this system works upon his own conceptual model of the underlying semantics. However, this paradigm lacks means to express the vague semantics and relationships that is buried within the objects under consideration (eg the topic of a text item, or the relatedness of two documents).
Hypertext-based systems interpret structural information (the hyperlinks) in a different way. Each hyper link represents an explicit relation (based upon topic, annotation, part-of etc. information) between different information entities. The layout of the global structure in systems like NoteCards, refer for instance to C. Foss,
Hamp Birgit
Mueller Adrian
Neumann Frank
Opalka Annette
Seiffert Roland
Ludwin, Esq. Richard M.
McGinn & Gibb PLLC
Truong Cam-Y
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