Visualizing Collaborative Filtering in Digital Collections

The NEAR (navigating exhibitions, annotations and resources) panel is a method of managing digital collections and user preferences through collaborative filtering and graphically revealing implicit data relations such as sharing, reference and similarity. It is implemented on AldrVIldrRE, an online multimedia repository. AldrVIldrRE supports semi-structured collections (exhibitions) which containing various resources and annotations. Its users are encouraged to contribute, share, annotate and interpret resources. Similar to the act of adding items into shopping carts in the e-commence applications, a user´s activities of searching, organizing and interpreting data in AldrVIldrRE are considered as evidence of user´s preferences. The design process of NEAR was guided by several principles from the visualization literature. It implements new navigation and communication approaches that support discovery of relations. Having tested NEAR with several users, we further analyze the design, report the evaluation and consider its use in other applications.