A reconfigurable presentation scheme for browsing composite objects effectively

Because of the limited screen size, any presentation layout cannot fully show a composite object and its referred objects all together on the screen. In addition, users generally want to browse various aspects of a composite objects, and to see several attribute values of a composite object at a time. Therefore we propose a reconfigurable presentation environment that allows users to dynamically reorganize the presentation layout in order to show the values of all the needed attributes on the limited screen. First, a presentation information class is defined for representing the presentation scenario of a composite object. Second, presentation transformation operations are defined that change the default presentation into the wanted presentation. We show how the proposed presentation environment can support a user´s request for browsing various aspects of composite objects, using an example retrieval session