Operational side-to-side comparaison with SeaDragon

Studying the United States legal code using computers is a field of its own ! So large is the code that to get some prespective the "Computational Legal Studies" Blog posted a 43MB poster of the United States Code. When the Code is formally organized into 50 titles, it is the repository for federal statutory law. While each of the 50 titles define a particular substantive domain, there structure can be represent as a graph/network.

At first they published the poster using ZOOMIFY, but it was not really a smooth visual experience which takes away from the pleasure of exploration, then they used Microsoft DEEPZOOM for smoothness but not everyone has Silverlight installed. In the end they settled for ZOOMORAMA for smoothness and maximum accesibility thanks to our Flash viewer.

Here is what "Computational Legal Studies" Blog wrote about Zoomorama:

"Above we offer the same visual of the United States Code (Titles 1-50) which we previously offered (using MS SeaDragon) this time we are using Zoomorama.  Zoomorama is an alternative to Seadragon which we believer might perform better on certain machine configurations.

Essentially, we do not want people to miss out on the visualization simply because their computer does not feature the necessary software/plugins.  While some class of endusers still might not be able to view either version, we hope this alternative version will maximize the chances that it would be visable.

Thanks CLS for the great operational return of experience.

Comments

[AD]

"we do not want people to miss out on the visualization simply because their computer does not feature the necessary software/plugins"

Great logic, and what happens when a user doesn't have flash installed?

[Franklin Servan-Schreiber]

The beauty of Flash is that they have 98% penetration, isn't it ? Moreover, even if we standardize on Flash 10, users don't mind downloading the new version because they all have heard of Flash.

Still we agree that down the road we probably need to work with SeaDragon (which we think is great), and even on Canvas (when everyone gets their acts together).

Thanks for your comment.