Cyberspace
geography visualization
Luc
Girardin, The
Graduate Institute of International Studies
Mapping the World-Wide Web to
help people find their way in cyberspace...
The central goal of this paper is
to give information about virtual locations to the
actors of cyberspace
in order to help them solve orientation issues, i.e.
the lost-in-cyberspace
syndrome. The approach taken involves low
dimensional digital media to create the
visualization that can guide you.
The World-Wide
Web can be depicted as a graph. Each resource is
a vertex and the links are the edges. The distances
between pairs of resources is then defined as the
shortest path in the graph between them, leading to
the creation of a metric. With the ability provided
to measure the distances among resources, it becomes
possible to represent each resource as a point in a
high dimensional space where their relative
distances are preserved.
It is clear that a high
dimensional space cannot be visualized and thus its
dimensionality has to be reduced. To perform this
task, the self-organizing
maps algorithm is used because it preserves the
topological relationships of the original space,
conjointly lowering the dimensionality. This creates
the ability to map any resources onto a lower
dimensional space, while maintaining their order of
proximity.
During this non-linear
dimensionality reduction, the distances among
resources are lost. Since it is primordial that the
distances can be evaluated, the unified
matrix method is used. By geometrically
approximating the vector distribution in the neurons
of the self-organizing maps, this method provides a
means to analyse the landscape of the mapping of
cyberspace.
To permit exploratory analysis of
the self-organizing map, the mapping is made onto a
two-dimensional visualization media. Note, however,
that reduction is also possible, using the proposed
method, to a space having an arbitrary dimension.
This approach enables the visual display of virtual
locations of resources on a landscape, in a fashion
similar to geographical maps.
A prototype performing the above
task has been developed. Using real information
about resources available in the World-Wide Web and
their connective structure, various maps have been
constructed. Given that the development is in the
prototyping stage, it has been possible only to
construct maps exhibiting limited numbers of
resources. The visualization, comprising some
interaction possibilities, is directly made
available on the World-Wide Web using forms and
sensitive maps, which enable direct retrieval of the
resources represented on the maps.
Despite some scalability problems
with the current implementation, new developments
will soon handle the limitation in information
gathering. An implementation model for the
construction of the maps on a parallel computer has
been proposed. Certainly further improvements are
therefore feasible.
The results are encouraging. No
major flaw has been detected in the proposed model,
and the first users are enthusiasts. It is thus
advocated that further research should be done in
this direction.
The above mentioned results,
including the documentation, are available at
<URL:http://heiwww.unige.ch/girardin/cgv/>
Thousands of accesses to these
maps, which show what we would like to call the
geography of cyberspace, have already been
reported....
Related Links:
Mapping
the geography of the World-Wide Web
Entitle the last paper
and poster
that have been presented at the Fith
International World-Wide Web Conference in
Paris.
Cyberspace
geography visualization
This report provides in-depth
explaination of the method. This document is also
available in PDF
and PostScript
formats
Integration in the Graduate
Institute of International Studies World-Wide Web
server
Illustrate the use of the maps
for a World-Wide Web server.
Integration in the TecfaMOO
Show how the maps can be
automatically integrated in a MOO system.
Experimental
analysis tool
This prototype has been used to
try to understand some parts of the World-Wide
Web.
Related
works
Contains links to various
related projects.
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