Haystack: A user interface for creating, browsing, and organizing arbitrary semistructured information

Abstract

Much past HCI research has examined the usability concerns of information management software for specific domains such as object-oriented software design, e-mail, and the Web. We believe that many of the results uncovered by these studies are applicable across multiple domains but that more broadly-scoped experiments require a system that can integrate multiple data sources. Haystack is a general-purpose information management environment designed to attack this very problem. Haystack's user interface, which incorporates capabilities from previous research such as context-specific visualization paradigms and attribute-based categorization, is built upon a highly expressive semistructured data model and data integration capabilities. In our demonstration we show how combination of a direct-manipulation-based UI paradigm and an expressive, federated data model can begin to address many of the information management problems plaguing general desktop computing today and can serve as a basis for further, yet unexplored, crossover information interaction experiments. © 2004 ACM.