mSpace: Semantic Web Interface

(via Slashdot)
The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. They state:

mSpace is an interaction model to help explore relationships in information.

mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person's interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues.

An mSpace presents several associated categories from an information space, and then lets users manipulate how many of these categories are presented and how they're arranged. In this way, people can organize the information to suit their interests, while concurrently having available to them multiple other complementary paths through that information.

This is interesting work, and builds on one of my main criticisms of how we currently navigate information on the Web: through linear & hierarchical (not to mention textual) lists of keyword search results.

Technorati tag: mSpace