Increasingly, we are entangled during our daily working lives in a web of distributed, networked information sources offering varied means of electronic communication. We have become information explorers in this complex, electronic world-at-large. In addressing the problems of navigation and orientation that these developments raise, a user interaction model is developed which also deals with some of the issues of workspace management addressed by systems such as Rooms and the Information Visualizer. In this model, the world-at-large is represented as Information Islands, each of which contains Buildings which themselves house items of information. The user explores this world in a Vehicle which has two views of the world; the public, comprehensive view, and a private, customised view. The Vehicle can also be seen as the user's own private workspace. Wherever the user wanders in cyberspace, he is always at home.
['John Waterworth']
A Pattern of Islands: Exploring Public Information Space in a Private Vehicle