Imagebeat

Mandala

Mandala is a general platform for using thousands of Web images to access and organize Web information— double-click on any image to access the associated page in a Web browser.

Mandala automatically groups images in a variety of ways and stores the groups as imagemaps. Groups are displayed in separate windows and can be edited by dragging images from one window to another.

Almost all Web tools use textual representations for modeling, organizing, and accessing information. The use of images as representations for information is largely unexplored, despite the observation that images from a Web page are often good representations for the page's content.

A wide variety of evidence suggests that image representations may be more suitable than textual representations for helping people access and organize very large collections of information. For example, psychologists have found that human visual memory and pattern-recognition far surpass human textual memory and pattern-recognition. With very little conscious awareness or effort, people tend to group related images, identify relevant images, and use images as mnemonics for associated information.

Image representations also seem to change the nature of several classic problems of hypertext systems (e.g. spatial disorientation, cognitive overhead, embedded digressions, session summaries).

Mandala is a general platform for studying image representations and comparing them with textual representations. One of the goals of this research is to identify useful organizational strategies for groups of image representations.

Mandala components