Demo of VLUM with Movie Data

News: Source is now available. GPL license for now.

Welcome to a demo of VlUM, the user model viewer described in my thesis. VlUM takes a user model described in simple RDF, and allows you to explore the model in certain ways.

Tested on mozilla with the java plugin v. 1.4.1. It should work with java 1.4 as well, but it needs the regex and xml libraries of 1.4 so it won't work on earlier versions. I've no idea how it'll go on browsers other than mozilla.

Start me.

What the heck is this?

It's a Visualisation for showing Large User Models. Originally developed to help medical students find topic areas they need to study, it has also been used to show movie recommendations.

The main pane of VlUM shows all the nodes in the graph, and is designed to help you see

In this demo we have a contrived model of movie recommendations from the IMDB. In the display the biggest node is the currently selected movie. If you select 'action -> show selected' the imdb page for this movie will be shown. Other nodes are sized according to how far they are from the current selection in the graph. Nodes are coloured according to how much the (hypothetical) recommendation service thinks you will like the movie - greener is better, redder is worse. The title is indented further from the left side of the display as the evidence for that decision decreases.

Clicking on a title makes that the new current selection.

Clicking with button 2 expands the area around the click to help inspect the more cluttered areas. Titles may also be dragged around to 'stretch out' areas of the display.

The slider at the top of the applet changes the value at which the colour changes from red to green. Use this to set how 'fussy' you're feeling. If you're only looking for very strongly recommended movies, move the slider further to the right, and only very strongly recommended movies will be green.