5.1 Browsing and Navigation

Please take a look at a screenshot below. The screen is divided into four areas:

• Title (top)
• Hierarchy (left) lists a horizontal view of the hierarchy. In our example we see a portion of the Thulamela hierarchy that represents Metal Implements with sub-classes.
• Detail (middle right) displays details about elements of a particular entity set. This window is populated when the list button next to the entity set is pressed. In our example, this window displays information about members of the entity set Arrowheads.
• Explain (bottom right) contains a description of the entity set. In our example, this window explains that the entity set Arrowheads contains Metal Implements of type "arrowheads".

Figure 3: Browsing the hierarchy and inspecting objects

The detail area of the screen contains various types of information about entities: their physical properties, photographs, discussion etc. All information is fully cross-referenced. In the Figure below, the detail window shows that our arrowhead was located in the surface layer.

Figure 4: Objects with cross-references

When the user clicks on the highlighted link that promises more information about the surface layer, a separate Detail view pops up, and contains information about other entities found in that layer. Here, for example, we see that an Unidentified Metal Implement with artifact id TM68 was also found in the surface layer, and if we scroll down in the Detail popup, we will see other finds in that layer.

Figure 5: Navigation using cross-references

© Internet Archaeology URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue21/3/browsing.html
Last updated: Mon April 30 2007