A Graphical Workbench for Knowledge Workers

We present iMapping, a novel approach for visually structuring information objects on the desktop. iMapping is developed on top of semantic desktop technologies and particularly supports personal knowledge management of knowledge workers. iMapping has been designed to combine the advantages of the three most important visual mapping approaches, Mind-Mapping, Concept Maps and Spatial Hypertext. We describe the design and prototypical implementation of iMapping which is fundamentally based on deep zooming and nesting. iMapping bridges the gap between unstructured content (like informal text notes) and semantic models by allowing to easily create on-the-fly annotations with the whole range of content links, from vague associations to formal relationships. Our first experimental evaluations indicate a favorable user experience and functionality, compared with state-of-the-art, commercial Mind-Mapping software.