Click for better resolution

Project: Portkey eTree Browser.

Concept: An evolving social portrait for online communities to present an outward face to visitors and dynamic query and overview-plus-detail tools that enable visitors to acquire the social milieu of a community space.

Features: The portrait visualizes:

• Discussion forum activities by displaying each forum as a branch and each leaf as forum thread,
• Posters by displaying them around a ring centered on tree; distance into ring related to number of posts.
• New thread posts appear as new leafs in lighter green while older thread posts turn darker over time,
• Awareness of posters present on Portkey on discussion pages.

The browser includes:

• Overview-plus-detail feature that integrates the social browser with functionality of the Portkey site,
• A time-lapse animation to reveal the growth and evolution of the Portkey tree ecosystem,
• Chat tool for users present on the site to engage in synchronous interactions,
• Various dynamic queries (e.g., posts by a poster, co-posters in a thread)

Novelty: Use of a life-like ecosystem (tree and animals) as a visual metaphor to visualize and present a public community portrait that evolves as a result of additions of posters, forums, and postings on Portkey. In an analogy to a natural ecosystem where different animals gravitate to different parts of the tree to form different botanical networks, participants of social environment congregate and contribute in various parts of the social environment.

Implementation: The eTree browser is implemented as Java 2.0 applet. It connects to a server-side component to exchange visualization data, awareness data and chat information using Java object serialization. The server-side component integrates with the Portkey site to obtain visitor list, user profiles, and posts using servlets. The Portkey Web pages includes a global JSP fragment on each page to record each user’s most recently visited page, to expire after 15 minutes, and to provide the visitor list of all users and their location currently on the site.

Principals: A student internship project done by Jun Zhang (U of Michigan). I guided Jun in the design and development of the metaphor and completed the implementation for Summer 2002 interns to use.

Publication: Lee, Girgensohn, and Zhang (in review).

Work Conducted: May — September 2001.