visualising
the datasphere
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There
have been many attempts to visualise, if not the entire Internet, at least
the part that users are interested in at any particular time. Some of
these generate views based on search inquiries. Others preset subject
areas or provide new ways to view complex data sets of information drawn
from many sources.
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 The
map, whether exact or not, must be good enough to get one home. It must
be sufficiently clear and well integrated to be economical of mental effort:
the map must be readable. It should be safe, with a surplus of clues so
that alternative actions are possible and the risk of failures is not
too high...
The image should preferably
be open-ended, adaptable to change, allowing the individual to continue
to investigate and organize reality: there should be blank spaces where
he can extend the drawing for himself. Finally, it should in some measure
be communicable to other individuals. The relative importance of these
criteria for a "good" image will vary with different persons in different
situations; one will prize an economical and sufficient system, another
an open-ended and communicable one.
Kevin Lynch, The
Image of the City
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An
early example, WebMap, generates a two-dimensional graphical
navigation map to help users to keep track of their position. During
the user's web session WebMap creates and updates a topology representation
of the navigation history. This internal representation reflects
the structure of the hypertext, i.e., the relation between all documents
the user has visited so far. In this context the web resulting from
the complete history is viewed as a graph whose nodes correspond
to WWW documents and edges to hyperlinks.
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A screen from a WebMap session
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 Moving
out of flatland, the Information Visualizer was developed at
Xerox PARC, and utilises an animated 3D tree that graphically links
categories with their sub-categories. It provides a highly intuitive
way of viewing and browsing document collections. Information Visualizer
generates 3-D graphical representations of file directories that enable
users to easily navigate their system contents and analyze document
collections at a glance. An animated "Tree" view rotates to show the
hierarchical relationships among documents, and a three-dimensional
"Grid" view displays clusters of documents over time. Users can switch
between these modes in real time to obtain a different "bird's eye"
view of document relationships. For example, one could view company
contracts by date and see how they are grouped by regional sales. By
seeing the relationships among documents, users can discover trends
that will enable them to make faster and more analytical decisions.
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Large Format
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Navigational
View Builder is a tool for allowing
designers of hypermedia systems to interactively develop useful
views of the underlying information space.
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This view shows the use of content-based and structure-based filtering
to simplify the information space.
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Entire
image
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A
team in the Communications Research Group at the University of Nottingham
have identified four approaches to generating the visualizations; Benediktine,
Statistical, Hyper-structures and User implemented, each applicable
to different types of data.
Using
this analysis, they have developed Populated Information Terrains
(PITS), an advanced VR system that allows multiple participants
to interact with information and collaborate with each other.
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Detail of view generated using a hyperstructure approach
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Go
to more about approaches
to visualisation |
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Detail
of view generated by a statistical approach
Entire image
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Detail
of view showing a hierarchical hyperstructure approach.
Entire image |
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Tamara
Munzner, whilst a grad student at Stanford University, experimented
with three-dimensional hyperbolic spaces in visualising information,
such as the link structures of the WWW. Her methods produce striking
3D images that have more than a hint of organic natural structures
to them.
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Starlight
is a "visual information mining" system developed
by Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory.
Originally developed to meet the analysis demands of U.S. Intelligence
organisations, Starlight is now being tested in a variety of other
industries, including law enforcement, public health, patent analysis
and logistics.
Starlight
is a visual information analysis system designed for integrating
and concurrently analyzing the contents of large, complex, multiple-media
information collections. Starlight incorporates an advanced information
model, a suite of pattern recognition algorithms and a variety of
visualization tools. It enables users to look for trends in volumes
of information --both digital and data -- and then displays that
information as a 3D picture.
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NewsMaps,
unfortunately no longer available since the acquisition of its parent
company Cartia by Aurigin Systems Inc., was one of best examples
of information mapping available on the Web. They provided daily
maps of international news, US news, and technology news. They were
among the most map-like of information visualisations, providing
a 'big picture' summary of large volumes of textual information.
The
spatial properties of location and elevation in the maps were used
to express key characteristics of the form and structure of the
information space. The peaks, labeled with keywords, were formed
by a large number of news stories discussing the same topic. The
higher the mountain, the greater the number of news stories. The
spatial concept of 'neighborhood' was also used, so the closer together
two hills are on the map, the more similar their information content.
Users could also plant red flags to mark interesting spots on the
map and thereby identify the underlying article.
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Large
format
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For
more information, examples
and discussion regarding datasphere visualisations:
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An
Atlas of Cyberspace is the best extant source of examples
of approaches to visualising dataspaces -- unfortunately, its links
are often out of date. |
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Mappa
Mundi is a web journal dedicated to all aspects of electronic
cartography. |
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See
also an overview of Information
Visualization Systems by Kevin Palfreyman
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| Software
tools such as Graphic History View, WebMap and Web Squirrel build on studies
and commonsense realization that individuals are more effective, feel more
in control and have greater information retention if they can visualise
their experience of web browsing. Most of these record a user's visits to
various sites or allow the user to easily build databases of related sites.
They are the equivalent of portolani, mariners' guides to safe harbours,
of which McLuhen wrote: "the sort of maps in question has nothing in common
with those of later design, being in fact more like diaries of different
adventures and experiences. For the later perception of space as uniform
and continuous were unknown to the medieval cartographer." These tools are
designed to help users maintain, organise and, sometimes, understand their
own personal experience of the Internet -- rather like a map which only
shows routes that you take in your every-day life. |
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Graphic
History View is a derivative work
of NCSA Mosaic version 2.5 which enhances the history-keeping facility
of the browser by providing a two-dimensional view of the documents
a user has visited in a session. By presenting titles, URLs, and
thumbnail images of the documents a user has visited in a session,
the Graphic History View allows the user to easily recognise a previously
visited document and provides an easy way for the user to revisit
that document and analyse the structure of a set of hypertext documents.
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WebSquirrel
is a still extant application, developed by the people at Eastgate
Systems which also bought the world Storyspace -- an offline application
to assist hypertext authoring. Web Squirrel, as the name suggests,
gathers URLs and, stepping outside the metaphor, cultivates them
in farms and is jazzed up with sound bytes and animated movement
through your crop of URLs.
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A
WebSquirrel farm of hypertext links
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An
example of a 'Pre-tree' analysis of a site
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Complex Hypermedia Networks through Multiple Hierarchical Views
is a research project that uses the strategy of providing the user
with different hierarchies, each giving a different perspective to
the underlying information space to help the user better comprehend
the information. They propose an algorithm based on content and structural
analysis to form hierarchies from hypermedia networks. The algorithm
is automatic but can be guided by the user. The multiple hierarchies
can be visualized in various ways. |
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PadPrints
is a browser companion that dynamically builds a graphical history-map
of visited web pages. PadPrints relies on Pad++, a zooming user
interface (ZUI), to display the history-map using minimal screen
space.
Detail
from two views of a PadPrints graphical history hierarchy. The nodes
in the left hierarchy are displayed at a constant scale factor while
the nodes in the hierarchy on the right are scaled according to
tree depth. Pad++ permits users to zoom into the tree and view the
nodes at a legible size. >>
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Large
format
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Also
see An
Atlas of Cyberspace for examples of Internet 'weather maps'
-- maps which graphically show Internet usage, e.g high-volume servers,
areas of data congestion, etc.
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At the more
conceptual end of things is Tracemap,
a custom program designed by Matrix Information Systems to quickly and
easily show the path that your request for a Web page takes. Tracemap
can display results as a map, graph or chart, noting slow nodes that your
request passes through and estimating the period of time that your request
will take. Matrix also produces 'Internet Weather Reports', dynamic maps
that chart the electronic flow of information around the globe, highlighting
heavily used, and therefore slower, routes.
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Spatial Metaphors |
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