SenseMaker is
an interface for exploring information from multiple, heterogeneous
sources. Information exploration takes place when a user is looking
for new information within a defined conceptual area. This overarching
area could be at any level of granularity. It could be as broad
as "software design" or as narrow as "the VisiCalc
interface." An important characteristic of information exploration
is that the user's interests evolve during the course of the
task.
In this talk, I will describe how SenseMaker supports this
contextual evolution of a user's interests by: (1) approximating
the current information context as the current collection of
accumulated information references, and (2) providing a unified
set of user-centered actions for examining the current context,
for progressing from one context to the next, and for returning
to previous contexts.
Michelle Baldonado is completing her Ph.D. in Computer Science
at Stanford University. Her dissertation is on examining and
exploring multi-dimensional information in a heterogeneous, distributed
environment. She built SenseMaker in order to experiment with
these ideas. Her current research interests also include metadata
architectures and document versioning. Before coming to Stanford,
Michelle did research in computational linguistics as an undergraduate
at Harvard University and research in speech processing as a
master's student at Cambridge University.