The Cat-a-Cone is a novel user interface that integrates search and browsing of very large category hierarchies with their associated text collections. One key insight is the separation of the representation of category labels from documents, which allows the display of multiple categories per document. Another key component is the display of multiple selected categories simultaneously, complete with their hierarchical context. The prototype implementation uses animation and a three-dimensional graphical workspace to accommodate the category hierarchy and to store intermediate search results. Query specification in this 3D environment is accomplished via a novel method for painting Boolean queries over a combination of category labels and free text.
This is the long paper, published at ACM/SIGIR 97.
Marti Hearst and Chandu Karadi, Cat-a-Cone: An Interactive Interface for Specifying Searches and Viewing Retrieval Results using a Large Category Hierarchy Proceedings of the 20th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference Philadelphia, PA, July 1997. html
Appendix to SIGIR 97 Paper
The SIGIR 97 paper was space-constrained, and so this appendix contains additional figures and captions designed to help explain the ideas more thoroughly.
Unpublished Appendix to Cat-a-Cone: An Interactive Interface for Specifying Searches and Viewing Retrieval Results using a Large Category Hierarchy. html
This was published in ACM CHI's ``late-breaking'' paper category. Therefore, it is a two-page introduction to the longer page, and is not considered archive material by CHI.
Marti Hearst and Chandu Karadi, Searching and Browsing Text Collections with Large Category Hierarchies , Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Conference Companion, Atlanta, GA, March 1997. html