Organizing and Navigating User-Generated Content for the Web: A Collaborative Approach Based on a 3D Multimodal Interactive Environment

This paper proposes an architecture for supporting the organization and fruition of information created by the collaborative effort of Web users. Large repositories of video streams are nowadays available on the Web; such repositories are usually accessed through interfaces that support only a subset of the search types that are typical on the Web. This work proposes a different approach for organizing and accessing such repositories, that often include not only video streams but also a lot of meaningful information such as the user interests and their network of friends. This work offers an extended view on all the features of the approach, including the description of a set of authoring interfaces that enable different categories of users to collaboratively build an interactive shared environment. The result of the authoring effort is displayed to the Web user as a 3D multimodal world where specific search types, such as associative seeking and information re-finding, are enhanced. A prototypical application, accessing the data from the YouTube video repository, is presented.