Introduction

Different kinds of data and documents accrue when working on computers daily:

Text, images, videos, mails, websites, but also dates, notes and much more. There are diverse meta informations attached to these documents. Obviously this includes the name, the type and the filesize of the document and its date of origin. But there are also additionally attached attributes like degree of urgency, period of validity, context, project reference and others are imaginable. These attributes can be very helpful for working, archiving and recovering the documents. That's not limited to self produced documents. Thus the given data space is for logical reasons the whole net.

Interface set by the data architecture

In the system 'spiderman' the described attributes are the basis for the visual interface between the data space and the user. Attributes with according interval values can be assigned to so called 'filters'. A necessary attribute is at least one document type, like a mail, a date etc.. The second attribute like date of origin or urgency has to be chosen freely and defines the intention of the filter.

Visual characteristics

Now these set filters act as collectors. That means, they attract the according documents like magnets and enable a purposeful selection. The accurate positioning of the documents depends on the scale of the interval values and the available space of the filter. There are two kinds of appearance: a rectangular xy-view with the interval values on the x-axis and the document type on the y-axis or a radial diagram with concentric circles for the interval values and included sectors for the document types. Both forms of representation are scaleable. Besides a few other considerations and functions, that facilitate the work on the computer, this innovative visual structuring builds the core competency of the system 'spiderman'.