ZASH: a browsing system for multi-dimensional data

This paper describes a browsing system for movie database. The system, named ZASH, was designed and developed to explore the following features: (1) the use of multiple 2D planes to separate different types of information; (2) the use of 3D space to improve the visibility of links between nodes; (3) the use of multi-dimensional scaling to lay out movies and commentators so that the similar data are placed physically near each other (4) the use of graphical fisheye views to improve the visibility of users' focus and its neighbors. The system also provides traditional searching methods (e.g. keyword, director, production year, etc.). By integrating browsing techniques and searching techniques, the system gave users more chances to find movies.