Scientific Discovery Within Data Streams - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 75

Fig. 6. Additional ThemeRiver user interface elements.
Fig. 7. ThemeRiver uses color family to relate themes.
Our physical information space, which includes walls, tables, and other sur-
faces, should now be our view into the electronic information space. People
perform physical interactions with information every day by picking up a topic,
building a model, or writing notes on a page. Similar interactions need to be
developed for electronic information. Providing these types of interactions in the
electronic world would allow us to interact more quickly, naturally, and hope-
fully more effectively in the broader context of information exploration. For these
reasons, Battelle, in association with the HITLab, have created the Human Infor-
mation Space (HI-Space) [7] (Fig. 8). This system utilizes knowledge from many
areas of research, including Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, Virtual
Reality, Kinesiology, and Computer Science, to create a physical workspace that
blurs the boundaries between physical and electronic information. The most de-
sirable aspects of both the physical and electronic information spaces are used
to enhance the ability to interact with information, promote group dialog, and
to facilitate group interaction with information to solve complex tasks.