I wrote this paper for a major german music label to expose the key issues of building up an successful online music store. Main task was to show how distributing digital music can be commercially fruitful, and fit the customer’s need at the same time.

The paper gives an overview on digital rights management, on varying digital music techniques and their ability to protect the label’s rights.

The second big task was the technical conception of creating the new system and integrating it with legacy systems.

A primer on Information Visualization.

Amongst others, topics covered in this paper include the visualization process (filtering, mapping, rendering, and usage of data), the distinction between data and information, as well as graph and network theory.

The later chapters focus on interaction and interface techniques and introduce the concepts of zoom + pan, focus + context, and other, more innovative visualization methods (e.g. TreeMap, fisheye and hyperbolic views).

Finally, the paper evaluates some products and projects, such as Cone Tree, Perspective Wall, and the well-known Map of the Market.

NetMapper visualizes the intrinsic structures of the net as composition of objects in spatial space. The links between resources are examined and stored with further informations such as link depth or resource names. Finally NetMapper creates a VRML-view through which the user can navigate. Thus the user learns the structure by analyzing this view.