Visualizing the World-Wide Web with the Navigational View Builder

Abstract

Overview diagrams are one of the best tools for orientation and navigation in hypermedia systems. However, constructing effective overview diagrams is a challenging task. This paper describes the Navigational View Builder, a tool which allows the user to interactively create 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 World-Wide Web.