Resumen de Exploring audio-visual metaphors to communicate web search results: an experimental platform
Dimitrios Rigas, Nicholas Aghahowa
This paper describes an experimental platform that was designed to investigate multimedia metaphors in communicating web search results. An experimental version of a web browser (to handle and represent search results) is the first step towards the exploration of multimedia metaphors in this research programme. The overall aim of our research programme is to investigate how search results extracted from unstructured sources can be browsed, manipulated and displayed using multimedia metaphors. Visual metaphors in graphical representations include two-dimensional bar charts, two-dimensional pie charts, three-dimensional bar charts, three-dimensional line charts and three-dimensional step charts. Auditory metaphors included synthesized, recorded speech and earcons. Demonstrations, observations and usability tests were carried out in order to establish an overall viewpoint of the validity of the approach of using different type of communications metaphors and media to communicate the search results. Therefore the paper concludes with general prima facie conclusions and the outline of a formal and controlled set of experiments.
