Visual Web Browser—Creating a 2D Interactive Space for Web Navigation

Information Outlook, April, 2000

Early explorers and navigators of the uncharted areas of our planet had to progress and advance their expeditions with little assistance, but followers were more efficient, had less risk, and were also more effective, as their maps were more informative of alternative paths, dangers, and conditions. When surfing the web, each expedition is almost as novel as any previous one. The mechanisms to provide the ability to step back, to retrace our steps, and to prevent us from going to where we do not want to go, are primitive.

We need to provide tools for the user to find alternative paths, or shortest paths, besides adding interesting URLs to our unmanageable list of favorites, so all pages are one click away. In our real world, travelers, pilots, and sailors need maps to guide their journey. Maps provide a capacity to plan routes, to retrace steps, to evaluate alternatives. Our hypothesis is that maps can be useful in guiding web journeys.

In fact, recent webmasters are adding site maps to their servers. Examples are Microsoft WebMapper, IBM's Mapuccino, and Lotus' WebCutter. These are also linear listings or perhaps simple diagrams, with hierarchically structure of the many documents in a site, but are still very limited in visually conveying information and a sense of space and proximity. They are even less successful in displaying which documents and pages refer to others and which are the existing alternative paths. Finally, they limit their information to one individual site; they provide no map of the world beyond.

Current Web Browsers & Site Mapping Techniques

Hypertext is a type of database that has active cross-references and allows the reader to "jump" to other parts of the database as desired. This makes the reading (and writing) process non-sequential. A hypertext database can be conceptualized as a network of nodes and links, where documents are the nodes and the links are cross-references. We name these documents as hyper-documents, and these cross-references as hyperlinks. The underlying data model of this hypertext network can be viewed as a very complex graph; it is a partially unknown huge graph.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a kind of hypertext database. The amount of information now available through the WWW has grown explosively. An increasing number of tools are also available to assist the user to manage and access information on the WWW. One of the key requirements for a WWW navigator is to maintain the user's sense of orientation and facilitate navigation within the context of the total information space.

The modern web browsers, such as Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer, can effectively assist the user to manage and access information on the World Wide Web. They excited people's interest because of the structure of hypertext that provides users with an effective and convenient way to move in cyberspace. This is done by clicking on a series of hyperlinks embedded in hyperdocuments.

However, these web browsers can not give users a visual "map" to guide their web journey. They do not provide a sense of "space" while the user is exploring the (cyber) space; instead they only give a series of lists (bookmarks and history lists are at most a one-dimensional graphical presentation). This is mainly because of the difficulty of constructing such a huge, complex, and dynamic map with a (virtually) unlimited number of nodes and edges.

Most existing visualization techniques emphasize "site mapping". That is, they try to find an effective way of constructing a structured geometrical map for one web site (a local map). For example, a hyperbolic tree Overview Diagram has been developed by Inxight Software Co. However, the "site mapping" technique only maps a single web site, and can only guide the user through a very limited region of cyberspace.

Overview of Visual Web Browser

The Visual Web Browser is expected to be the next generation tool for Web navigation. It views the whole cyberspace as one graph--a huge and dynamic growing graph which is partially unknown. At any time, a tiny subset of the huge graph is known and a picture of this subset is displayed on the screen. Exploration of the huge graph proceeds by changing the subset of the huge graph. This allows the user to visually browse through the web with a sense of "space". The Visual Web Browser explores the huge graph by quickly tracking the subset of the huge graph based on the focus of the user, and provides the user with a dynamic visual map for guiding the web journey.

The Visual Web Browser is like an online geographical map. Geographical maps do not offer you information on every geographical feature. Some of it is filtered, thematically, or by the scale. Too much in a map makes it unreadable. While traveling with the aid of a map, typically we focus in the region or neighborhood that currently surrounds us. That allows us to decide if a turn at the next intersection is needed. So our Visual Web Browser maps the neighborhood of the web that we are currently in, filtering some of the information.