Techniques are presented for determining a first set of display elements, each display element associated with a first display characteristic. An interesting element in the first set of display elements is determined. A second set of elements related to the interesting element is determined. A third set of elements based on the first and second set of elements is determined using intersection, union, subtraction addition and other logical operations. A third set of elements not yet added to the element collection is determined. The elements in the third set are associated with a second or ghosted display characteristic. The elements in the third set are inserted within the sorted context of the visualization based on spatial distortion rules which help to preserve spatial memory cues in the visualization of the element collection. The elements may be documents in an information repository, linked contact information, linked information records in a database or other types of information.

Techniques are presented to semantically zoom information to fit within a bounded display space. A bounded display space optionally constrained by size or shape is determined. Semantically coherent portions of information to be displayed within the bounded space are determined. Transformation rules are applied to the portion of the information to be displayed to produce a plurality of different length representations. A store of semantic zoom level information associates combinations of the different length portion representations. A desired number of information elements to be displayed within the bounded display space is determined. Iterations over the store of semantic zoom information determine combinations of different length representations that fit within the bounded display space.