A City Metaphor to Support Navigation in

Complex Information Spaces

Andreas Dieberger
Emory University - Multimedia Communications
550 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, G A 30322, U S A
email: adieber@emory.edu, andreas.dieberger@acm.org

Abstract
A major problem for users of modern information systems is the retrieval of new and
previously viewed information from the system. Systems like the Word-Wide Web are heavily
interlinked but do not communicate structure that helps users to navigate the information it
contains. The use of appropriate navigation metaphors can help to make the structure of
modern information systems easier to understand, and therefore, easier to use.
We propose a conceptual user interface metaphor based on the structure of a city. Cities are
very complex spatial environments and yet, people are used to navigating within cities. They
know how to get information, how to reach particular destinations, and how to make use of the
infrastructure. Furthermore, cities possess a unique set of navigational tools that lend
themselves to creating sub-metaphors. A city metaphor makes this existing knowledge about a
structured environment available to the user of a computerized information system.
In this paper, we first describe properties of future user interfaces (or user interface metaphors)
that we think will distinguish them from current systems, like the richness of information or the
use of visualizations to show the structure of information spaces, and the ability to serve not
only a single user, but a user community. Then we describe the structure of the information city
metaphor, its structuring and navigation metaphors, and what we see as its main advantages
and disadvantages.

1. Introduction
Users o f modern information systems often struggle to retrieve and to re-find
information they have seen before. Challenges navigating such systems as the Word
Wide Web for example arise from the lack of apparent structure. Using appropriate
navigation metaphors, we make the structure easier to understand, and therefore
easier to use.
User interfaces are based on metaphors that help understanding the system in terms of
concepts the users already know. Spatial metaphors try to exploit the extraordinary
human ability to organize objects in space, to recall and reason about their locations,
and many other space related cognitive abilities [25].
We can extend the space of the commonly used desktop metaphor to rooms, buildings
and a whole city. The city structure is interesting because its enclosed spaces can
represent levels of enclosure or security -- a necessity for modern information
systems.

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In this paper, we describe a spatial user interface metaphor. It is called the
Information City, and is a conceptual system focused on navigation. The city concept
further provides metaphors for security and privacy. Cities are social spaces: people
guide each other, point out landmarks, give route descriptions, and interact directly
with each other. These properties of the city environment and its navigational
infrastructure are the qualifies we try to capture in our Information City metaphor to
transfer them into the domain of virtual information spaces.

Structure of this Paper

In Section 2 we argue that communicating the structure of an information space is
essential for navigation, and define navigation as a mapping from knowledge about
the environment to activities in it. We then further describe spatial metaphors to
include two concepts that can help remedy some of the problems of spatial
metaphors: history enriched environments and magic features. We further motivate
our choice of the city metaphor, and describe the basic concepts for the metaphor.
Section 3 describes the Information City in more detail. We define structural elements
as a basis for navigational tools. Information carrying entities provide information
within the city structure, and magic features help improve the metaphor's scaling
behavior.
Section 4 addresses a few issues an implementation of the metaphor will face, and
Section 5 draws conclusions from the previous sections, points out unresolved issues,
and summarizes the paper.

2. Spatial Metaphors for Navigation within Complex Information

Spaces
Finding information in an information space can be supported by an appropriate user
interface metaphor, as it fosters understanding of the information space's structure.
Information spaces need structure to be useful and this structure needs to be
communicated to the user. The term information space hints at a spatial
conceptualization of the underlying metaphor. There is a strong relationship between
spatial metaphors and information visualization: the visualization communicates the
structure of the information space to the user which makes navigation in the space
possible.

2.1. Basics for navigation

Information Visualization
The information space's structure can be communicated to the user through a
graphical representation of the space and the elements in it ~. Examples of such
visualizations are the Information Visualizer [8], the Navigational View Builder [32],
the Narcissus system [19] Chalmer's landscape metaphor [9], or the visualizations for
the Hyperwave system [31.
We use the term visualization, but want to stress that the representation of structure
not necessarily has to be visual.

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All of these visualizations are based on spatial metaphors. While the metaphor is not
always made explicit, it influences the visual design of the system. Even without
explicit spatial structure in the data set, it is sometimes useful to represent data using
spatial metaphors, or to talk about the structure in spatial terms. Generally, it is
assumed that spatial visualizations of information structures help users to learn the
structure of the information space. 2

Navigation in Information Spaces

Many information systems contain information with hypertext properties [33].
Hypertext consists of nodes containing information connected by links. Users
navigate this structure by following (directed) links. Where most types of information
have a typical order in which they should be apprehended, this is not necessarily true
for hypertext. Users easily lose orientation even in small hypertexts. This has been
called the getting lost in hyperspaceproblem. It is not a shortcoming of the hypertext
concept so much as it is the failure of the hypertext's user interface to communicate
the structure of the information to the user [14].
Users map from the information space's structure and their tasks to navigational
activities. This mapping is impossible without apparent structure. This becomes
apparent in the key questions of (information) navigation [12]:

"Is there 'a piece of information' with the property X?"

"How do I get to this information?"

"Where am I now in relation to ...?"

The spatial formulation of these questions indicates a spatial conception of the

navigation process. Note that users do not inhabit a position in space and have a
history of visited places unless the user interface provides it.
2.2. Spatial User Interface Metaphors
The usefulness of spatial metaphors is intuitively understandable and proven in
several studies, like [4]. Two earlier studies are [24, 30]. However spatial metaphors
do have their shortcomings which need to be addressed to make them the basis of an
information system.
An advantage of spatial organization schemes is the user's initial familiarity with
them. Most people organize objects in a spatial way, and have strongly developed
spatial cognitive abilities. They have highly developed methods to describe access
paths to objects, and are able to understand and follow route descriptions even when
these are incomplete or partly incorrect.
Spatial arrangements can express relationships between objects that are difficult to
describe in a formal way, and spatial language can describe complex relationships or
even leave room for ambiguity.
2 It is often assumed that visualizations are the better the more 3-dimensional they are.
However Poblete reports in [34] that simpler and flatter representation of information
structures sometimes are learnt easier than more advanced 3D visualizations.

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A good example for complex spatial relationships is the structure of a city as
overlapping neighborhoods or districts. City areas do not form a strict hierarchy, but
rather, a structure of partial containment [1]. At the same time, the city structure
shows hierarchical properties which promote further understanding.
The major shortcoming of spatial metaphors is that they scale up badly. The desktop
metaphor is an example of this. Many users choose to view their files as a list rather
than as a spatial arrangement of objects because a large number of objects cannot be
represented well. This shows the close relationship between spatial metaphors and
information visualization because a more elaborate visualization of the file space, like
the Cone Trees of the Information Visualizer, scales up much better [8].
The city metaphor addresses scaling by providing global overviews in the form of
city maps. People may be familiar with only a limited part of a city, but have
strategies to navigate unknown parts reasonably well by using either maps and
available infrastructure, or by interacting with other people. This reduces the apparent
size of the city and thus, also addresses the scaling problem. The "magic features" we
introduce into the city provide an additional tool to cope with the complexity of very
large spaces.
The Necessary Amount of Realism
Spatial filing is a useful form of organization for many tasks that involve a large mass
of diverse objects or entities. The key word here is diverse because spatial filing does
not work well when the objects look too similar. Representing the space and the
objects in it realistically helps create the necessary diversity.
A detailed rendering of the metaphor's source domain eases transfer of preexisting
knowledge to the target domain. Artificial environments can be enriched by
visualizing, for example, usage information as read wear [21]. The idea behind
history enriched objects is that they wear out like real objects, and that visualizing
usage of information highlights frequently used and therefore more promising
objects. For examples of recent work on group memories and collaborative navigation
that often make use of concepts like read wear, see [20, 31, 35]. Information richness
in systems that support collaboration and interaction between users is an important
ingredient to provide what we call social navigation [16].
Social navigation is a behavior where users of information systems freely share
pointers to information, and help out other users who are disoriented or new to the
system. Essentially social navigation is something that happens in every inhabited
city space as well, when people ask for the way or when inhabitants modify their
environment to make it nicer, more personalized and therefore, easier to recognize
and navigate. Such information in the world is created by the inhabitants of a city,
and may actually be incomprehensible to outsiders. Information of this kind is close
to Bolter's Writing on the world concept [6, 12]. Current information systems seldom
support user communities that can personalize the information space in such a way,
but in a city metaphor, it would be the logical thing to support such processes to make
the environment more legible [28]. Note that this use of the word "legible" differs a
little from the concept of "legibility" as used in [29], where it refers to how easy it is
to read and learn an overall city structure.

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Magic Features -- Deliberately Breaking the Metaphor

Spatial organization is no universal cure for navigation issues. Spatial arrangement
determines both the distance as well as the effort to cross this distance between
objects. In conventional space, effort is proportional to distance, and available
navigational means. Information systems that slow down navigation just to convey
the feeling of distance probably will not be accepted well once distances and delays
reach a certain amount. 3 We therefore need to provide shortcuts through space that
may break the relationship between distance and effort in favor of navigation speed,
and appear as something that lies outside the underlying metaphor. We call them
magic features [12, 13].
A consistent spatial metaphor seems to prohibit the use of magic features, however,
by loosening the rules we can improve navigation in the information space. This has
to happen in a controlled manner -- otherwise the spatial metaphor becomes too
confusing for the user. Magic features should be designed to look differently enough
from the rest of the system so that users recognize them as something special [13].
They can provide shortcuts that can make navigation in large spaces more effective,
and thus tackle scaling issues.

2.3. Motivation and Basic Concepts for the Information City

The main argument for using a city metaphor is that cities provide structures that
scale up relatively well and provide navigation tools to cope with the space's
complexity. Another argument for the city is that people know strategies to navigate
effectively in unknown parts of the city.
Although cities are hierarchical in one sense, people's mental representations of cities
also contain also overlapping elements. Based on these elements, we can describe
complex relationships of containment in a city metaphor, including encapsulation and
access control.
In addition people are used to navigating city structures, and to interacting with other
people in the city environment. They know social protocols that control the
interaction with other users when inquiring about locations, asking for the way, or
gaining access to closed spaces. The city is, therefore, also a social space.

2.3.1. Elements of the City Environment

When people navigate within a city they build a mental representation of it that they
use to reason about the environment. According to Kevin Lynch's study "The image
of the city" [29] there are five major elements in that city image: the Node, the Path,
the Edge, the District and the Landmark.. Note that these are not the only city
elements conceivable (see for example [26] ).

3 In an early version of the Storyspace hypertext system such delays occurred for
technical reasons when accessing nodes that were 'far away' in hyperspace. Accoring
to the authors (personal communication) users noticed and appreciated this additional
navigational feedback.

58

A path is one of the two linear elements in the city environment. It describes how to
get from point A to point B, for example, from the home to the office. Paths can cooccur with major streets in the environment, but they do not have to.

Districts are areas containing objects showing common character. This may be in the
style of buildings, their prominent use, or any other aspect. Districts are not
necessarily clear-cut entities. An alternative term is neighborhood.
Landmarks show unmistakable form, and are discernible from all similar objects in
the environment. Landmarks are of special importance when giving directions since
they are easily recognizable.
The node is another point-like element, and the edge is a linear separating element.
A well-designed real city provides a well-balanced combination o f these city
elements. This allows users to easily learn paths, to describe and remember routes as
well as locations. In Lynch's words, it makes the city more legible [29]. A legible
environment is easier to understand and to learn.
It also may give locations within the city a feeling of place which provides context
for objects nearby, and a framework for social interaction [t7]. In our design of the
Information City metaphor we therefore tried to provide a reasonable mix of
characteristic city elements so that users can easily learn the environment.

Richness of the Environment and Magic Features

City elements must be visually different enough to be identifiable. In real cities this is
taken care of through building styles, facade ornaments, including personalization by
the inhabitants (see above) and so forth. In a digital city, we have to artificially create
such diversity. Ideally, this not only makes elements of the city easy to distinguish,
but also conveys information to the user.
To improve scaling of the city metaphor, we define magic features as shortcuts
through the city environment. They can be magic portals or transportation that is
always available. They appear also in structures like a room that contains an area that
is larger than its outside (envelope structure).
Note that magic features should be used sparingly. Creating too many magic portals,
for example, destroys the specialty value of these elements. Users will not see them as
an addition to the structural elements of the city but as the main structure. The result
is a hypertext of buildings without the structural benefits of the city metaphor.

2.3.2. Other City-like Metaphors

Several spatial metaphors in literature have been based on the structures found in
buildings and cities. The desktop metaphor is a subset of such a concept itself.
Extensions of the desktop can be found in systems like Magic Cap or the Xerox
Rooms systems [18].
Further extensions can be seen in systems like the Digital City
(http://www.viper.net/fun/dc), the WebWorld (a discontinued system on the WorldWide Web), the Paxton virtual city (http://www.eolas.co.uk/mellanta/fd/) or Apple's

59
discontinued e-World, all of which use village or city metaphors. Recent systems
extend the spatial metaphor to a multi-user VR world to meet people and to chat, like
the Worlds Chat system (http://www.worlds.neff).
Through advances in the field of information visualization, there is a growing interest
in city-like metaphors. For an example, see the visualizations for the HyperWave
system, a second generation distributed hypertext system that shows many advantages
over the architecture of the World Wide Web, and could be used as a template for
creating city structures for the Web as well (see [2, 3]).
Most of these systems present the user with a relatively small space in which she can
arrange objects according to her wishes, but do not scale well as their metaphors often
add only metaphorical sugar to an existing system. In systems designed mainly as
meeting spaces, navigation of large amounts of information is a minor concern, and
therefore, only limited design effort is spent on these issues.
Some systems do not directly use a city metaphor, but rather, apply city-planning
principles to improve a visualization technique. A good example is Rob Ingram's
work. His LEADS system improves the legibility of an information visualization by
identifying districts, paths and nodes in the visualization, and by providing landmarks
[22, 23]. Like our city metaphor, this system is geared towards both an information
space that is relatively static, and users who frequently revisit the space, because
otherwise, there is no point in learning the space's structure.

3. Description of the Information City Metaphor

In this section we describe the Information City metaphor. Because of space
constraints the ontology described here is only a part of the metaphor. For more
details see [12]. We start with the structural framework as the basis for the navigation
tools. Information content is provided though information providing elements. To
improve the scaling properties of the city we introduce several magic features. In an
additional section we discuss issues of actually creating an Information City.

3.1. Topology and Overall Structure

The topology of the Information City is based on generalizations of Lynchs's three
major elements: container, landmark and path. The Information City consists
basically of a collection of containing elements that are associated with at least one
landmark.
The largest containing element is the city itself, but there is no restriction to only one
city. The next smaller element is the district. Inside districts there may be subdistricts that consist of buildings. Buildings contain floors and rooms -- according to
the structure of the information organized within the container.
Each container can be considered a complete subspace that does not have to adhere to
the general city framework but may be organized using a different metaphor, should
that be adequate.

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3.2. Lesser Structural Elements
When closing in on the city, major navigational paths that separate large districts
come into view first. As districts contain related objects, the separation into districts
can be highlighted in the visualization. Getting closer brings lower order paths and
smaller containers into view. Buildings and small-scale areas can be recognized.
Finally, single buildings, small-area landmarks, architectural properties of single
buildings, and specialized buildings, like subway stops, can be discerned.
3.2.1. Containers

A building is a container for information or infrastructure in the Information City.

Buildings have a unique address and show their accessibility using doors.

Landmarks are special non-access or public access buildings. In the first case, the
building has only landmark function, e.g. a clear vista at the end of a path. This
case is useful if landmarks are placed at the center of a cluster of related
documents if there is no object available in that location to serve as landmark. In a
graphical realization of the Information City landmarks can be seen from far
away. Major landmarks should be higher than most buildings to provide
orienteering aids for users flying over the city.

are containers inside buildings. Their walls may contain doors or windows
to access other rooms or the outside. Rooms show their accessibility through
doors. Like other containers, they can contain a non-spatial metaphor, like a viewRooms

screen.

3.2.2. Navigation Infrastructure

Paths connect two locations in the city. Therefore, they have starting and ending
points that should coincide with landmarks. As in the real city, a path is a
continuous element of the Information City. Paths outside buildings are visualized
as streets or roads.

Intersections of paths are s q u a r e s . Large squares are major elements in the city.
They contain stops of public transport systems and they can contain landmarks.
Squares colxespond to the nodes in Lynch's city elements.

Lines

are linear elements that don't adhere to the Euclidean space concept.
Transportation, for instance the subway, travels on lines. Lines are connected to
the city environment in a few distinct locations. Paths and lines should be
visualized differently.

Inside buildings (containers) similar elements occur as described above, however,

they have different names and sometimes, slightly different functionality. They are
the h a l l w a y , the l o b b y and the e l e v a t o r . The elevator behaves like a line and also
provides access to navigational infrastructure outside the building.

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3.2.3. Connections and Separations

Connections and separations are conceptually similar structures, however separations
provide access control. Normal navigation structures do not restrict movement in any
way.
Doors connect locations inside a building to indoor locations or to the outside.
This state of doors (open, closed, locked . . . . ) shows the accessibility of the
corresponding room. Open doors can be looked into. This "preview" shows if the
door leads to a room or to an envelope.
Windows are similar to doors, but are mostly located in facades. Although they
can be used as departure points and destinations for flying, they are not meant as
major paths but to look through. A special type of window is the magic window.
Windows are a sort of shortcut to rooms inside a building.

3.3. Navigation Tools

We distinguish between transportation and navigation tools. Although both of these
are navigation in the traditional sense, we consider transportation to be a more
passive form of navigation where the user is moved, whereas navigation is an active
process. For example, consider the difference between taking a taxi and driving a car.
In a taxi, the user instructs the driever as to the desired destination, and then sits back
for the ride. On the other hand, driving her own car, the user has to choose the route
and steer the vehicle herself. There are several types of navigation and transport
metaphors according to the navigation task.

Navigation

W a l k i n g is navigation for short distances. It uses paths, squares and all open
access structures. Walking can be half-automatic when an address (a link) close
by is selected or the user decides to follow a "red carpet".

Driving is a metaphor for fast walking and for covering medium distances.

Flying is used for long distance navigation.

Transportation
Taxis are like cars, but are not constantly controlled by the user. They can be
summoned rom anywhere and are able to navigate using incomplete information.
They can even provide a guided tour.

The subway provides long-distance transport in the city. It has a set of predefined
stops which always coincide with major landmarks. Leaving the subway at those
landmarks either places the user in the main lobby or in front of the landmark. The
travel time gives a rough indication of the distance traveled. Subways do not show
the environment traveled. Subways can be left only at predefined stops but a
temporary subway stop can be summoned anywhere outside buildings to enter the
subway. Inside buildings elevators provide a connection to the subway. The use of
the elevator heightens the user's awareness that she is leaving the building.

62
The subway tunnels through the city space. It connects distant points without
traveling through all locations in-between and thus, travels in a different space
than a walking user. The subway's space concept is based on connectedness. This
movement of subways in a somewhat detached space was observed already by
Kevin Lynch in [29].
Depending on the distance traveled, users apply different navigation and
transportation tools, which need to be realized differently. A classification according
to distance decides on the visual representation of the navigational activity and its
enactment [5, 27] (representation of the navigation process itself). Correct enactment
helps users to better understand from where to where they are navigating. The
enactment must provide the necessary feedback so that the user does not get
disoriented in the navigation process.

3.4. Information Providers

Information providers are the information-carrying entities of the city. Some of them
are specialized structural elements.

Walls and Signs

The facade of a building is not only an walt, but it provides information about the
contents of a building. Facades should show read wear to indicate usage use and
visual cues to indicate the content of the building.
Information walls present information and also show read wear. They can link to
other information walls (tramway or red carpet metaphor) or though magic
windows embedded in them. These links should also show their usage.
Information walls cannot be moved.

Signs are small information walls which provide no linking.

Movable Information Objects

Removable information objects are based on source domains like writing pads,
books, or business cards, and contain information that is not strictly associated to
a location. They may be available as single objects or they may be provided by
information dispensers that create an unlimited number of information objects.
The dispenser is associated with a fixed location in the city, but the information
object itself is movable. Examples of metaphors for dispensers include a
newspaper vending machine or an information kiosk.

3.5. Magic Features

The city metaphor is usable without magic features, but we believe that it scales well
only when magic features are added. In this section, we describe a structuring and a
navigation feature. Most navigation and transportation tools (see Section 3.3.) show
magic properties but are grouped with the other navigation and transportation tools.

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Envelopes are special rooms. They are outside of the Euclidean space concept of
the city. Like rooms, they are accessed through doors, but they give access to very
different structures or even another Information City. A city contained in an
envelope can be used to represent archived data. The contents of an envelope may
actually be larger than the envelope seen from the outside. A transition to an
envelope has to be clearly enacted as a magic feature.

Leaving the envelope transfers the user back in front of the door leading to the
envelope. Such a transition has to reestablish context for the user e.g. by placing
the user high above the city and zooming into the location she occupied before
entering the envelope.

Magic windows (or teleporters) provide a direct connection to other parts of the
building, another location in the city, or a view-only connection of another
location. They are a special case of the information wall. Magic doors and
windows have to clearly show that they are magic features and, as something
"special", they should be used only sparingly.

4. Implementation Issues
Even with the elements defined in Section 3 it is not too clear how to start building an
Information City. It is unlikely that a complete city can be created in one step.
Instead, it has to grow out of the interaction of its users with the city environment.
We envision that districts evolve from a basic minimal infrastructure which should be
available in every container (building, room,...) consisting of at least one landmark
associated with the container. Thus, all containers start as a seeding kernel and
expand over time. Large districts are surrounded by a stretch of undefined space
(called the void) that allows them to grow and shrink as needed.
An alternative to this scheme is to provide a well-developed organization of a district
from the very start and adapt it over time. Once an area gets overly developed, it can
be transformed to an envelope to create more space in a certain location.
T h e City as a Text-Based E n v i r o n m e n t

The Information City is a conceptual metaphor and it is unlikely we will ever see a
complete implementation of all ideas and structures described so far. However
information systems are likely to adapt parts of the city for the user interface to large
information spaces. This can be done either using a textual virtual environment or in a
full-fledged graphical system. In this Section, we describe a few of the advantages of
textual environments for realizing the city metaphor. These observations stem from
our experience with the Juggler system that used parts of the Information City
metaphor (for details see [15, 16] ).
Textual virtual environments, sometimes called MOOs (Multi User Dungeon Object
Oriented) are multi-participant virtual environments in which locations, objects, users
and even activities are described by text only [7, 10, 11, 17]. Textual virtual
environments can be used to experiment with spatial metaphors as was described in
[14, I5]. The text-only representation allows us to realize parts of the metaphor that
are difficult to realize graphically. Although metaphors are independent of their

64
representation, most users will find a textual representation more difficult to get used
to than a well-designed graphical representation.
Textual virtual environments show their strengths mainly in two ways: the
representation of read wear, and the enactment of magic features.

Magic Features and Read Wear

The enactment of most movements in a MOO is very simple; the description of the
room the user arrives in is displayed, and observers see a line describing that a user
arrived through the south door, for example. An exit leading to an adjacent room and
an exit leading to a distant location are thus indistinguishable, unless the second exit
is described as something special, and unless the transition is enacted differently.
Believable magic features and special exits in a MOO often feature very distinct
descriptions from normal exits. Typically, these descriptions differ in how the exit is
described beforehand, and how the process of using the exit is described both to the
user and to bystanders [14, 15, 37].
Elaborate textual descriptions of navigational enactment can more easily convey a
magic feature. A graphical representation of the process would have to be much more
complicated to be credible. On the downside, this textual type of feedback does not
easily provide ongoing feedback because the system cannot rely on the reading speed
of the user. Also, for features like the Information City's subway system, a textual
enactment might be difficult to realize.
Similarly, the concept of read wear is difficult to realize well graphically because
slight color and size changes over time may well go undetected. In addition it is not
clear how to represent aging of information using color. Making a document appear
more yellowish over time may actually heighten its visual prominence and therefore,
achieve the opposite of the desired effect [36]. A textual description, however, can
describe read wear easily as was demonstrated in [15].
As these examples show, there are advantages in using a text-based system for
implementing (parts of) the Information City. Magic features and read wear are
especially difficult to realize convincingly in a graphical version. A textual
representation provides an easy to realize and easy to use alternative. However, for a
mass-market implementation of the Information City, text-only implementations will
probably not be successful.

5. Conclusions
We described a conceptual spatial metaphor, called the Information CiO,. This
metaphor is based on knowledge from the field of city-planning, and designed to
support navigation in the resulting, easy to learn, virtual city environment. Contrary
to other city metaphors in the literature, we define a detailed ontology of city
elements, describing how each element pertains to the navigational structure and
influences the use of navigation tools.
The city is supposed to scale up relatively welt because we define magic features that
provide short-cuts through the city space. We also define a structural magic feature,

65
called an envelope, that can contain a space that is larger than itself. The envelope
and the void, stretches of undefined space, allow the city to expand and shrink
without becoming unrecognizable, and therefore, hard to navigate, We also give
suggestions on how to initially set up a city.
The Information City is designed to be a multi-user environment. It is not a sterile
information graveyard but a social space. The information rich environment of the
Information City supports users in giving directions, in recognizing landmarks and so
forth.
We address several problems implementors will have to face when actually
implementing an Information City, among them, how to create the actual structure of
the city and how to realize magic features and read wear. One solution we propose is
using seeding kernels as basic elements that evolve into larger city structures. Based
on our experiences with the Juggler system we propose realizing magic features and
read wear textually. However, for a mass-market realization of the city, this solution
may not be ideal.
With the rate at which technology is progressing, a fully graphical implementation of
the Information City is probably possible today, but without a well designed
implementation of magic features and read wear, an Information City will fall short of
its potential.

Acknowledgments
The groundwork for this publication was laid in the first author's Ph.D. thesis, advised
by Peter Fleissner and Andrew Frank of the Vienna University of Technology. Work
on the Juggler system has been funded in part by a research grant from the Austrian
"Fonds zur F6rderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung" (Dr. Erwin Schr6dinger
Stipendium), Grant J01021-MAT. We want to thank Andrew Frank in particular for
his comments and help with the draft of this paper, and our anonymous reviewers for
pointing out related work of which we were previously unaware. We would also like
to thank Linda Erhard for very detailed proofreading of the paper.

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