According to the announcement, the project is part of a new initiative by SIS to investigate the use of graphical user interfaces and display techniques for exploring large databases. By prototyping visual-mapping user-interface technology and then testing the searching and discovery effectiveness, SIS hopes to improve access to and understanding of the many health-related databases it provides for NLM.

"We are working with Antarcti.ca to experiment with alternate user interfaces as a means of augmenting accessibility of information in large text-based databases," said Martha Szczur, deputy associate director of SIS. "Given the exponential growth of biomedical information, it is essential to facilitate access to it for physicians, researchers, and consumers. We are interested in how effective visual interfaces may be for navigation and browsing."

According to Tim Bray, Antarcti.ca's founder and CEO, the project is expected to take about 5 months. He says one of its goals is to determine just what kinds of searches are best in a visual environment. "Simply put," he said, "we want to find out what maps are good for."

DIRLINE is a small file (about 10,000 records) in comparison to the vast NLM databases. Since it has MeSH indexing, it looked to be a good subject for this test project. Szczur indicated that the DIRLINE implementation would most likely be only a prototype from which SIS could learn and explore during this research and development phase. DIRLINE contains location and descriptive information about organizations; federal, state, and local government agencies; research resources; projects; and databases concerned with health and biomedicine. It is available through http://dirline.nlm.nih.gov.

Actually, the DIRLINE project is not Antarcti.ca's first with NLM. According to Bray, the company used the freely available PubMed data and built a demo interface for it using Visual Net. The demo, which is available at http://pubmed.antarcti.ca, is one of several that were built to show the capabilities of the VN graphical interface. The folks at SIS found it interesting and agreed to fund the prototype of DIRLINE to study the possibilities.

According to Bray, VN is widely applicable to areas such as research libraries, corporate intranets, and e-commerce. The company had first targeted corporate intranets and claims among its customers IBM, Intel, and Macdonald & Associates (a source of financial information and research). It then saw the potential for applying the technology to help library OPAC users. About a year ago Antarcti.ca launched its Visual Net for Libraries product. Library resources are organized into neighborhoods of information based on standard classification schemes, such as LC or DDC, with visual metaphors used to convey holding attributes (name, author, size, age, holding type, and availability). All collections, databases, and formats—OPAC, periodicals, audio, video, and special collections—are searchable from one map. Visual Net may be licensed as traditional server-side software or as a service provided for a flat monthly charge.

Privately held Antarcti.ca was founded in 1999 and is still trying to get the word out about the benefits of data visualization in communicating information. Bray is certainly no dot-com newbie. He has had a 20-year career in the software industry and is recognized as an expert in Web architecture, information retrieval, and software optimization. After managing the New Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo, he co-founded Open Text Corp. and introduced what would become one of the first commercial Web search engines. In 1996, he joined the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Working Group, serving as co-editor of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML 1.0) specification.