Exploring personal media: A spatial interface supporting user-defined semantic regions

Graphical mechanisms for spatially organizing personal media data could enable users to fruitfully apply their conceptual models. This paper introduces Semantic regions, an innovative way for users to construct display representations of their conceptual models by drawing regions on 2D space and specifying the semantics for each region. Then users can apply personal categorizations to personal media data using the fling-and-flock metaphor. This allows personal media to be dragged to the spatially organized display and automatically grouped according to time, geography, family trees, groups of friends, or other spatially organized display representations of conceptual models. The prototype implementation for semantic regions, MediaFinder, was refined based on two small usability tests for usage and construction of user-defined conceptual models. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.