CMPS 261 Final Project Proposal: Info Garden
David Seagal
Spring 2010
Project Description
As personal data grows and becomes increasingly difficult to manage, people are looking for new ways to browse files over traditional file hierarchies. Metadata tags have emerged as an alluring alternative, and have proven to be effective in many Web 2.0 services, such as Flickr and YouTube.
Info Garden is an attempt to encourage and facilitate the tagging of personal files by representing them with a garden motif. The purpose of Info Garden is twofold. One, to provide a visualization of a user's files based on their tags that is both useful and aestetically appealing. Two, to motivate and encourage users to tag untagged files through the program. Info Garden will be developed using the Processing programming language.
Features
Garden theme, with tag nodes represented as flowers and fruit.
Nodes are colored and grouped based on metadata tags.
The shape of the node indicates the extension of the associated file.
The size of the node indicates the frequency of use for the file.
Files that do not have tags appear as weeds, deliberately throwing off the aestetic feel of the garden and encouraging tagging by the user.
Timeline
April 25 - Finish research, begin implementing tagging functionality.
May 2 - Implement tagging functionality.
May 9 - Implement node clustering functionality.
May 16 - Implement functionality for checking file extensions, frequency of file use.
May 23 - Implement garden theme, ability to save/load tag data.
Jun 1 - Finish project.
Related Work
The work proposed with Info Garden overlaps in part with previous research on node clustering for information visualization purposes. In particular, Henry et. al. (link) and Jia et. al. (link) have tried to apply clustering techniques to social networks. Some elements of VisLink (link) are also similar to what is being proposed for Info Garden.