Constructing, Organizing, and Visualizing Collections of Topically Related Web Resources

Abstract

For many purposes, the Web page is too small a unit of interaction and analysis. Web sites are structured multimedia documents consisting of many pages, and users often are interested in obtaining and evaluating entire collections of topically related sites. Once such a collection is obtained, users face the challenge of exploring, comprehending, and organizing the items. We report four innovations that address these user needs. . We replaced the web page with the web site as the basic unit of interaction and analysis. . We defined a new information structure, the clan graph, that groups together sets of related sites. . We augment the representation of a site with a site profile, information about site structure and content that helps inform user evaluation of a site. . We invented a new graph visualization, the auditorium visualization, that reveals important structural and content properties of sites within a clan graph. Detailed analysis and user studies document the utility o..