Comparative Evaluation of Two Systems for the Visual Navigation of Encyclopedia Knowledge Spaces

Modern digital encyclopedias contain hundreds of thousands of textual articles and multimedia elements. Alternative discovery techniques facilitating the visual exploration of encyclopedia knowledge spaces have recently received much attention. We present the results of a comparative usability evaluation of a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional visualization system integrated with the Brockhaus encyclopedia. Both systems enable visual navigation of article context. Results indicate that both systems perform comparably and that users prefer the threedimensional visualization system.

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