Mapping and Browsing the Web in a 2D Space Mao Lin Huang, Wei Lai, Yanchun Zhang. Tenth International Workshop on, 元智資工所 系統實驗室 楊錫謦 2000/7/12

Outline Introduction Graph Model Architecture Conclusion

Introduction  The current web browsers do not provide a sense of space or orientation in cyberspace. Bookmarks and history lists are at most a linear list.  “site mapping” – try to find an effective way of constructing a structured geometrical map to one web site.  They consider mapping the whole of cyberspace as a huge and partially unknown graph.

Introduction(Cont.)  Visual Web Browser conveys the sense of space and the sense of location with spatial dimensions. A sense of proximity is represented by placing nodes in proportion to the measurements of time/cost of retrieving a page. At any time, a tiny but nonempty sub-graph is known.

Graph Model  It is more convenient to make no distinctions between the directions of the hyperlinks.  The web journey proceeds by visualizing a sequence F 1 =(T 1, Q 1 ), F 2 =(T 2, Q 2 ) …of logical frames.  F=(T,Q) consists of a spanning tree T and a queue Q of focus nodes.  To obtain F i+1 from F i, the user selects a non-focus node u in F i, then node u become a new focus of F i+1.

Graph Model(Cont.)  If the number of nodes in Q i arrives a upper bound B, they delete an old focus node v from Q i.  They choose v to be one of the focus nodes in Q i whose graph-theoretical distance from u is largest in F i.

Architecture  The Visual Web Browser is made up of several components: A fast accessible linkage server An information filter An on-line animated visualizer

A fast accessible linkage server  One approach is to download the web page corresponding to the focus node and then analyze the web page source text to find its neighborhood. not efficient  Another approach is to build a server that maintains all indexed URLs like a search engine.

Information filtering  Graph structure based rule eliminate cycles  Web context structure based rule  Information based rule ignoring GIF, JPG or CLASS, etc.  Document structure based rule  Degree based rule select a certain number of hyperlinks

On-line animated visualizer  similar to “Core Tree”

Conclusion  The Visual Web Browser provides users a dynamic visual map to give users a sense of space.