Information Navigation

Synonyms

Information browsing; Information foraging; Interactive information exploration

Definition

The word “navigate” has its roots in the two Latin words “navis” (ship) and “agere” (to “move”/“direct”) and has been used for centuries in the domain of nautics for activities necessary to find one’s way, and to control the movement of a vessel while traveling from one location to another. Different scientific discoveries, technical inventions, and cultural backgrounds, have brought about a wide variety of navigation techniques and navigation devices, all of them have in common that they assume a certain structuring of the underlying geographical space. With the advent of electronically stored volumes of information, and electronically networked information sources in particular, the concept of geographical navigation has been generalized and adopted as a metaphor for accessing chunks of digitalized information in a goal-directed way. In this metaphorical view perceivable presentations...