Evaluation of a visualisation design for knowledge sharing and information discovery

This paper presents a tool using a 3D interactive visualisation system that allows knowledge sharing and information discovery. The tout proposes a visualisation design using direct manipulation techniques to convey information about a structure for knowledge sharing. The structure describes a knowledge theme described as a set of concepts, The set of concepts provides a particular context description about the knowledge being shared. The application tested and presented in this paper uses the set of concepts to direct searches in the World Wide Web. The visualisation design is briefly presented and preliminary evaluation results are reported. These results show that the system tends to be better supporting people with some knowledge expertise about the knowledge being, shared even if they have little World Wide Web expertise. These results seem to show some potential for the visualisation design as an interface for both knowledge sharing and information discovery. In particular, for people that has already some knowledge expertise about a given theme, but usually suffer from information overload or lack of knowledge about the structure of large information spaces, such as the World Wide Web.