Structural analysis of hypertexts

Abstract

Hypertext users often suffer from the "lost in hyperspace" problem: disorientation from too many Jumps while traversing a complex network. One solution to this problem is Improved authoring to create more comprehensible structures. This paper proposes several authoring tools, based on hypertext structure analysis. In many hypertext systems authors are encouraged to create hierarchical structures, but when writing, the hierarchy is lost because of the inclusion of cross-reference links. The fu-st part of this paper looks at ways of recovering lost hierarchies and finding new ones, offering authors different views of the same hypertext The second part helps authors by Identifying properties of the hypertext document Multiple metrics are developed including compactness and stratum. Compactness indicates the mtrinslc connectedness of the hypertext, and stratum reveals to what degree the hypertext is organized so that some nodes must be read before others. Several exmting hypertext are used to illustrate the benefits of each techmque. The collection of techmques provides a multifaceted view of the hypertext, which should allow authors to reduce undesired structural complexity and create documents that readers can traverse more easdy,

What Can Searching Behavior Tell Us About the Difficulty of Information Tasks? A Study of Web Navigation

“…If we consider the individual web pages visited by searcher to be the nodes of a graph and the links actually followed by the searcher to be the grap h edges, we can compute the graph properties, such as stratum (Botafogo et al, 1992). Stratum was used to characterize searcher's behavior on similar web navigation tasks by McEneaney (2001), Shih et al (2004), Herder et al (2004) and Juvina et al (2004).…”

Google's web page ranking applied to different topological web graph structures

“…In other related works, tree structures have been used to design better hyperlink structures (Botafogo, Rivlin, & Shneiderman, 1992). The reverse process of discovering tree structures from hyperlink web pages and discover hierarchical structures has also been studied (Mukherjea, Foley, & Hudson, 1995;Pirolli, Pitkow, & Rao, 1996).…”

Toward Measuring Network Aesthetics Based on Symmetry

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