Aspect filtering as a tool to support conceptual exploration and presentation
Daniel Pettersson · 2002
The ability to effectively filter information when presenting large amounts of data is of great interest – but how do you do it in practice? This is the main focus of my work, which includes design and implementation of an aspect filtering toolkit in Conzilla. Conzilla is a tool for conceptual exploration and presentation of digital information. Conzilla is developed in Java and receives structured information according to a data model, presently based on files written in XML. The information is presented as concepts in mind-maps, concept-maps, that the user may navigate through. The result of my work has been to design a dynamic functionality that filters the content of a concept according to an arbitrary choice of aspects. Dynamics is essential since you sometimes want to change filter depending on the context for a chosen concept. I have implemented a functionality in Java, which uses the data model structure found in the XML files to match the aspects. This thesis is a part of a distributed learning environment that is being developed at the Centre for user-oriented IT-design (CID), at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. It has been supervised by Tekn. Dr. Ambjorn Naeve, who is a mathematician and a senior researcher in interactive learning environments at CID.