Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Chairy Cheung

Taurean Addair Jones

Euan Peter Garden

A user interface having components that each provide a view on underlying data, and controls for preparing the data. This allows the user to have a wide variety of views on the data set, and corresponding controls appropriate for that view. The level of control over data preparation is even further enhanced by a selection control and navigation control. The selection control allows a portion of the view to be selected, which would in turn affect the view(s) displayed in one or more other user interface components. The navigation control causes the user interface components to display views on the data set as that data set existed at various prior stages in data preparation. The selection control remains active even when viewing prior stages of the data set.

Navigation of data set preparation

A user interface that includes components that each provide a view on the underlying data set, and also provide controls for editing or preparing the data set. The user interface components include a detail user interface component that displays a detail view on the data set, and summary user interface component(s) that each display a corresponding summary view on the data set. A promotion control promotes a summary view on the data set to a detailed view on the data set, and corresponding changes the controls usable in the promoted detail view. This allows the user to have a wide variety of views on the data set, and corresponding controls appropriate for that view. Thus, the user can take the most efficient and intuitive approach to editing or preparing the data, thereby allowing data preparation to be more efficient, intuitive and likely correct.

Multi-view control on data set

Navigation using metadata exposed in a semantic zooming environment. The semantic zooming environment has multiple zoom levels. For a given displayed object, the displayed object may not just be a different size, but actually be displayed differently at each semantic zoom level. At one or more of the semantic zoom levels, a displayed object may have displayed metadata of the displayed object. A user may interact with the metadata to trigger a query on that metadata against a data source, causing an entire collection of objects to be populated that also have some relationship to that same metadata. The collection of objects may itself be populated within a semantic zoom environment that additionally exposes metadata, allowing the process to repeat. Thus, the principles described herein allow advanced navigation techniques whereby data may be narrowed down and/or change direction, easily by users manipulating metadata exposed in semantic zoom environments.

Metadata-based navigation in semantic zoom environment

Disclosed herein is a system and method for allowing a user to zoom in and out on a large data set and maintain resolution and understanding on the data. The system monitors how the user uses the data and also detects the user's actions with respect to zooming on the data. Based on the user's interactions and the type of data the system determines for each zoom level what data to display to the user on the display and if the display needs to be modified to maintain usability of the data. In some scenarios a display management component may change the format of the data such that the user may better understand the data.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Chairy Cheung