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Visual
SiteMap
Courtesy of
Drexel
University
This page demonstrates a research
prototype that aims to provide some solutions to the questions above.
- Would you like to have a city map when
you visit a city you have never been before?
- Then do you wish to have a map when you
visit a Web site?
- Do you often go through many levels of
the web hierarchy before getting to the page you want?
- Then do you wish to see the complete
hierarchy of a website in a single screen or a map?
Sitemap is a Java application that
visualizes a given web site (or a collection of links). Through a
WebCrawler, Sitemap first traverses every link of the web site, collects
statistical data, and index all the words and pages of the site. Based on
the statistical data and the indexing, sitemap converts each page of the
site into a vector, and uses these vectors to train a neural network. As
the outcome, the trained neural network presents the site in an organized
map: subject areas are identified and labeled; their sizes and locations
are determined by relationships among the subjects and by their occurrence
and co-occurrence frequencies. Links are clustered and located within
their respective subject areas, represented by colored dots. Some patterns
of the site are clearly revealed (see two observations below, for
example).
To help users interact with the map,
Sitemap provides various interactive tools. For example, areas can be
labeled in more/less details through adjusting a scroll bar; links can be
selected through clicking or dragging; contents of any selected links can
be shown in a separate window, etc.
In short, Sitemap has three components:
- a WebCrawler that indexes a site;
- a neural network training procedure
that organizes the site;
- and an applet interface that presents a
map of the site.
Because of web crawling, indexing, and the
complex computation involved in the neural network training, Sitemap
currently can not be used to generate a map on the fly. However, due to separation
of interface and back-end engines, the interface applet is fully
interactive and can be used online, provided that other preprocessing has
been completed beforehand. What you will see in the following are several
examples of Web sites presented by the applet.
Note that you must have a java-enabled
browser to view them (Currently, the maps look best on a workstation with
a large monitor. They work OK on Windows'95, but their functions suffer a
lot on Macs). If your monitor is smaller than 17", you should click
on the link "for small monitor" on each example.
Other related self-organizing Web Maps
Explore them and find out if Sitemap would
be a good alternative table of contents or indexing page for a web site.
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