Indexing and retrieving web documents as direct Manipulation of images,

The rapid growth of network communication through the World Wide Web has encouraged a large diffusion of connections to Internet, due to the heavily interactive services which are offered for accessing, using and producing the incredible mass of information and more general resources which is now available. People communicating in this environment are usually end users whom are not skilled in computer science and are experienced in a specific area; they are generally interested in search, producing information, and accessibility. The phenomenon of the World Wide Web is producing a significant change in the concept of document, which is becoming strongly visual and dynamically arranged. A document is an image, and an image is a document. This change requires a new approach in presenting, authoring, indexing and querying a web document. In the paper we propose visual language defined to reach the previously introduced goals, discussing the case of an Information Base containing clinical data. Notwithstanding the amount and the heterogeneity of the data available, it is quite difficult to access truly interesting information and to suitably exploit it; this is due to the poor usability of tools which offer and interaction style still limited with respect to the interfaces WIMP (Window, Icons, Menu, Pointers) and to the indexing techniques usually adopted to organize the web pages by means of robots and search engines.