Panza et al. excellently present the emerging role of a zoomable user interface (ZUI), connecting it with a growing number of demanding user needs and enhanced experiences. The paper’s main contribution lies in its design of a prototype of a semantic ZUI, which incorporates both audio and visual semantic engines for tagging and organizing metadata.

The presentation is easy to follow, and contains enough details to allow the reader to discover the important features of the FileMage browser, as well as its main characteristics. For example, it organizes files and folders in an infinite zoomable plane, allowing the user to navigate intuitively through voice tagging.

The authors specify their contributions to enhancing the FileMage system with three characteristics: tagging for filtering purposes, automatic organization for browsing, and feature extraction for analysis. One novel issue they address is the tag management task, using the LibValhalla library. Additionally, they show how their algorithm clusters photos that belong to the same event in Photobeat. Following this idea, one can build a storyboard in VISTO, using keyframes based on image color distribution.

To summarize, the paper not only shows the role of semantics in ZUI, but also demonstrates how tag information, voice control, and frame extraction enhance the user experience.