Facet lens: local exploration and discovery in globally faceted data sets

The process of design and construction in the field of automotive engineering produces lots of digital documents like images, text documents, calculation sheets, videos or 3Dmodels. Their amount, size and file type diversity increase rapidly since project team structures are getting more and more interdivisional. To regain an overview of the available items and their characteristics, the utilization of a faceted browser (or faceted search) is a comfortable approach. Its textual property selectionis already state of the art and leads to a reduced result set. But its deficiency is located in the global, overall affection of the search field. By introducing Facet Lens, we combine the benefits of the classical facet based search by topological context on a multi-touch device. The designer is able to screen the visual results for specific properties by moving the lens above the surface. Therefore, only regional subsets can be taken into account and the area is discovered along a user defined path individually. We argue that this is more intuitive and meets the creative and cooperative way to work in an interdisciplinary team much more than strict, textual filtering on all available items.