Visualization of web spaces

Abstract

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 visualization has been proposed as a way to cope with these problems by taking advantage of people's innate perceptual skills to support their cognitive skills. Many paradigms have been proposed for the visual presentation of web spaces (i.e. structured or unstructured collection of web pages). This study surveys these paradigms to provide a map of where the research in this field is, and what directions future research and practice can take. For this, we introduce a classification scheme to help in the systematic understanding of web visualization and for providing a framework for the development of future visualizations.

Social network analysis and supply chain management

“…However, there is much more information when looking at the metrics that these analysis techniques output. (Turetken and Sharda, 2007) state that the three most used social network analysis metrics are: degree centrality, degree of intermediation (Betweenness centrality) and proximity (closeness). These three metrics are further developed next.…”

Trails–An Interactive Web History Visualization and Tagging Tool

“…Then we determined our design goals based on the analysis of results: • Intuitive. Information visualization has been proposed as a way to cope with the problem of "lost" by taking advantage of people's innate perceptual skills to support cognitive skills [1]. Thus, much like other web history visualization tool, such as Eyebrowse [3], our tool should produce easy-to-read statistical summary visualization for time-management reminder purpose.…”

“…The World Wide Web is said to be the most popular global communication medium and knowledge repository, which is now the platform for a myriad of activities [1]. As more and more human activities have come to rely on the use of the web, people are spending significant amount of time everyday interacting with and through web browser software, to search, work, entertainment and communicate [3].…”