cahier scientifique revue technique luxembourgeoise

32 CAHIER SCIENTIFIQUE | REVUE TECHNIQUE LUXEMBOURGEOISE 2 | 2010
Since the first personal computers were introduced, the number of digital assets (documents, photos, e-mails ...) we have to deal
with on a daily basis has significantly increased. However the tools and programs for managing them have mostly remained the
same. In the context of exploring new ways to interact with digital assets, three bachelor theses were written at the University of
Luxembourg. Namely: “Metadata Enhanced Asset Management”, “Multitouch Based Asset Browsing” and “Timeline Based Asset
Browsing”. This article describes the latter one which deals with the aggregation of digital assets into a timeline representation
based on semantic relations established through user defined tags.
LAUREAT DU PRIX DE LA REVUE TECHNIQUE LUXEMBOURGEOISE 2010
TIMELINE BASED ASSET BROWSING_
Jérôme Wagener
Timeline based asset browsing (TBAB) describes the approach
of browsing digital assets using a timeline rather
than relying on a hierarchical view. The key ideas employed
within this project concerned the aggregation of assets,
their relations, and the usage of timelines for obtaining an
effective visual representation.
To get an idea about the context, it is helpful to have a
look at the semantic desktop. This collection of ideas and
concepts deals with the interpretation of information and
the process of establishing meaningful relations between
those. Although still in development the semantic desktop
promises to drastically improve the usability of computers
regarding digital assets.
One of the main ideas behind both digital asset browsing
and the semantic desktop is that of discovering hidden
information within assets. Today this means that we have
to extract information, often from proprietary applications
and ambiguous fi le formats.
Using this technique, third party applications are able to
create new types of user interfaces by intermixing different
data and information, and to provide new types of views of
a user’s assets.
Timeline Based Asset Browsing
Having so-called “assets” respectively “digital assets” was
an essential notion within this project. A digital asset basically
represents any existing form of valid digital information,
meaning that a simple text-document, an e-mail and
even a blog-post on the internet are digital assets.
As a requirement for this project, it was necessary to establish
relations between different types of digital assets.
Although some of today’s operating systems are capable
of doing this based on keywords, the use is quite limited.
Problems occur as soon as we try to establish relations between
assets with easily extractable keywords (text-fi les, emails,
source-code ...) and assets not having such information
(pictures, audio-fi les, binaries ...). As a consequence
timeline based asset browsing enforces all digital assets to
be appropriately tagged in order to establish relations. A
tag hereby simply represents textual information attached
to a fi le such that assets having a tag in common automatically
have a relation to each other.
Based on the assumption that digital assets sharing a relation
will most likely reside within the same temporal
context, timeline representations were chosen as visual interfaces.
This interface was meant to provide access to different
types of information including pictures, videos, textfi
les, e-mails, calendar-events, blog-posts and others.
The prototype shown in fi gure 1 presents an implementation
of the concepts mentioned above. It was developed as
a proof-of-concept and provided the basic functionalities
required for timeline based asset browsing. Users have the
possibility to query for tags that were previously attached
to digital assets in order to receive a timeline representation
containing the results. The prototype interface moreover provided
quick access to the assets as well as different views.
The application architecture itself was split into three major
parts: The “Aggregator” required for gathering all necessary
information, the “Transformer” required for establishing
a timeline representation, and the “Interface” used for
presenting the results. [See fi gure 2]. The shared framework
encapsulated some of the functionalities that were required