Navigating the personal information sphere

Abstract

A major trend in information society is the integration of personal information from different sources. Digital data about persons, their behavior, their content and their social structure is merged into the personal information sphere; a multi-dimensional space containing information related to a person. In the research project di.me 1 , funded by the EC, a so called userware is developed to support the management of it's personal sphere on multiple platforms. Main requirement for the userware is to help the user keeping an overview on his personal data, while giving a powerful tool for changing all kind of aspects, like changing access rights, merging information from different sources. For this an intuitive but rich visualization of information and relations is required. A userinterface concept describes, how a user can navigate through his information sphere and which artifacts support managing it. This paper describes the user-interface concept within the di.me userware, giving special focus on navigation and visualization of the personal information sphere.