Designing a Personal Information Visualization Tool

摘要

Interacting with computers has become part of our daily lives. This interaction results in large amounts of personal information, spread throughout places and applications. As a consequence, it is quite difficult to get an overall view of all our information or to find a specific item we are looking for. A meaningful visualization technique may be the solution to this problem. We present VisMe, an interactive visualization tool that allows users to explore personal information. It integrates and uniformly displays relevant concepts in interconnected timelines. Each of these items (people, subjects and documents) can be progressively explored, creating new timelines, where several avenues can be simultaneously explored in context. VisMe allows relations between concepts to be explored in a straightforward way. By providing the means to interactively find relations between different kinds of information in order to retrieve personally relevant data, VisMe gives users insight into their digital selves that current tools have a hard time providing.