The Aleph

Abstract

One of the most elusive targets in hypermedia research has been to provide effective support for user navigation [6]. The popularity of the World Wide Web and its inherent vastness has only made things worse: many of the tools that were proposed to alleviate this problem in closed systems do not scale well when applied to WWW. We designed a tool, that we call The Aleph, that addresses the support of user navigation with two views, known as the Travel Map and the Content View. The Travel Map assists the user at the stage of traveling trough the docuverse, and the Content View helps him at the moment of recalling and organizing the known space. We developed a novel approach based on document collections, that takes advantage of 3D space, to give much more information than is usually available in 2D representations, and to simplify the map layouts. The maps provide a framework that relates document and terms with specific positions in space. The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 1 positions The Aleph in the context of a large-scale hypertext system as WWW. Section 2 shows the structure of The Aleph, the two views it provides, explains why to use different views, how they are related, and how they work. Finally Section 3 relates The Aleph to other tools that address similar user needs and design objectives.