Yoshihiro Masuda

Frame-axis model for automatic information organizing and spatial navigation

In taxonomic reasoning tasks, such as scientific research or decision making, people gain insight and find new ideas through analysis of large numbers of factual data or material documents, which are generally disorganized and unstructured. Hypermedia technology provides effective means of organizing and browsing information with such nature. However, for large amounts of information, the conventional node-link model makes linking or browsing operations be complicated because their relationship have to be represented as binary relations. In this paper, we propose a hypermedia data model call Frame-Axis Model, which represents relationship between information as N-ary relations on mapped space. Also, the automatic information organizing mechanism which is based on this data model and the browsing interface HyperCharts which employ spatial layout are provided. Finally, we show some browsing examples on our working prototype system, CastingNet.