Three dimensional visualization of the World Wide Web (original) (raw)
Related papers
Visualizing the structure of the World Wide Web in 3D hyperbolic space
Proceedings of the first symposium on Virtual reality modeling language - VRML '95, 1995
We visualize the structure of sections of the World Wide Web by constructing graphical representations in 3D hyperbolic space. The felicitous property that hyperbolic space has "more room" than Euclidean space allows more information to be seen amid less clutter, and motion by hyperbolic isometries provides for mathematically elegant navigation. The 3D graphical representations, available in the WebOOGL or VRML file formats, contain link anchors which point to the original pages on the Web itself. We use the Geomview/WebOOGL 3D Web browser as an interface between the 3D representation and the actual documents on the Web. The Web is just one example of a hierarchical tree structure with links "back up the tree" i.e. a directed graph which contains cycles. Our information visualization techniques are appropriate for other types of directed graphs with cycles, such as filesystems with symbolic links.
SaTellite: a visualization and navigation tool for hypermedia
ACM SIGOIS Bulletin, 1990
SaTellite is a visualization and navigation tool for a hypermedia system. It is based on the concept of affinity between objects; that is, a relationship with an associated intensity. The user is presented with a two dimensional map that provides a view of the hypermedia environment where objects lying close together have a greater affinity than those lying further apart. The system provides different views by allowing modification of the underlying measure of affinity. The system is also able to track dynamically the evolution of the objects' relationships. Based on the affinity concept, we develop new dynamic presentation techniques that do not depend on the explicit display of links between the nodes of the graph. The dynamic layout algorithm that we present at the end of the paper is based on these techniques and it allows for the display of rapidly changing relationships between objects.
Visualising the web: why we should abandon graphs and trees
2001
Abstract The World Wide Web affects an increasing number of people's lives. The manner in which these people interact with web sites is heavily influenced by the sites' design and structure. However, the structures of different web sites vary greatly, as they are determined by the whim of the site designer, and not by strict rules. Without being able to rely on knowledge and experience of previous sites visited, perceiving the structure of the current site being viewed is a complex task.
ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems, 2007
The World Wide Web is a dominant global communication medium and knowledge repository. It is used by a great number of people with a variety of computer skills hence its usability is critical. As with many large information collections, the challenge with web usability is understanding the structure of a collection of information objects (web pages) to find relevant ones for satisfying a specific information need. Web sites are organized in a hyperlinked structure that somewhat addresses this challenge. However, this "connectedness" also causes the now well-known "lost in cyberspace" phenomenon where one may get confused within the complex organization of a web site. Meanwhile, information exploration on the web is not limited to browsing a web site. The problem of finding relevant information applies to a collection of pages that come from various web sites as in the case of the results of a "less than perfectly constructed" search query. Information v...
Visualizing the World-Wide Web with the Navigational View Builder
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1995
Overview diagrams are one of the best tools for orientation and navigation in hypermedia systems. However, constructing effective ovemiew diagrams is a challenging task. This paper describes the Navigational View Builder, a tool which allows the user to inte:ractively creafe useful visualizations of the information space. It uses four strategies to form effective views. These are binding, clustering, filtering and hierarchization. These strategies use a combination of structural and content analysis of the underlying space for forming the visualizations. This paper discusses these strategies and shows how they can be applied for forming visualizations for the WorldWide Web.
Visualizing Web Navigation Data with Polygon Graphs
2007 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV '07), 2007
As the volume of digitally accessible information grows, there is increasing pressure on the development of data visualization methods to enable humans to interpret that data. We provide a description of our WebViz system, as a tool to visualize both the structure and usage of web sites. We illustrate the use of our visualization paradigm by introducing polygonal graphs layered on top of our adaptation of radial disk trees. In our system, the structure of a web segment is rendered as a radial tree, and usage data can be extracted and layered as polygonal graphs. By interactively creating and adjusting these layers, a user can develop real time insight into the data. We present the system, show the idea of interactive visual operators, and provide some examples that help show the value of the specific visualization techniques, as well as the interactive use of those techniques.
CZWeb: Fish-Eye Views for Visualizing the World-Wide Web
ADVANCES IN HUMAN …, 1997
The proliferation of interconnected information on the Web suggests the need for tools to organize the interconnections. We discuss an implemented system, CZWeb, which traces a user's path through Web space using a fish-eye view technique. An experiment using 12 university ...
Web-Based Visualization of Large Hierarchical Graphs Using Invisible Links in a Hyperbolic Space
Many real-world data warehouse applications involve navigation of large highly connected hierarchies e.g. web pages, product catalogs, and document hot topics hierarchies. Quite often users are confused and overwhelmed with many complex displays. This paper discusses a new invisible link technique for linking a large highly connected graph in a hyperbolic space without cluttering the display. Only the primary links are shown to the user. All other cross-links are hidden in the property of each node and invisible to the user. These invisible links only appear when the user focuses on the node. "Invisible link" allows a user to freely focus on the hierarchy of interest.
Visualizing complex hypermedia networks through multiple hierarchical views
1995
Our work concerns visualizing the information space of hypermedia systems using multiple hierarchical views. Although overview diagrams are useful for helping the user to navigate in a hypermedia system, for any real-world system they become too complicated and large to be really useful. This is because these diagrams represent complex network structures which are very difficult to visualize and comprehend. On the other hand, effective visualizations of hierarchies have been developed. Our strategy is to provide the user with different hierarchies, each giving a different perspective to the underlying information space, to help the user better comprehend the information. We propose an algorithm based on content and structural analysis to form hierarchies from hypermedia networks. The algorithm is automatic but can be guided by the user. The multiple hierarchies can be visualized in various ways. We give examples of the implementation of the algorithm on two hypermedia systems.
WebQuery: searching and visualizing the Web through connectivity
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1997
Finding information located somewhere on the World-Wide Web is an error-prone and frustrating task. The WebQuery system offers a powerful new method for searching the Web based on connectivity and content. We do this by examining links among the nodes returned in a keyword-based query. We then rank the nodes, giving the highest rank to the most highly connected nodes. By doing so, we are finding "hot spots" on the Web that contain information germane to a user's query. WebQuery not only ranks and filters the results of a Web query, it also extends the result set beyond what the search engine retrieves, by finding "interesting" sites that are highly connected to those sites returned by the original query. Even with WebQuery filtering and ranking query results, the result sets can be enormous. So, we need to visualize the returned information. We explore several techniques for visualizing this information -including cone trees, 2D graphs, 3D graphs, lists, and bullseyes -and discuss the criteria for using each of the techniques. 0 1997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.