Visualizing the Web

In WebMap, irregularly shaped topic zones represent the content of the Web. Web browsers have changed little since the first versions of Mosaic came out of the University of Illinois, way back in 1993. To put a visual face on the job, a company called WebMap Technologies has developed a new way of browsing that provides a sense of location on the Web. The technology requires a connection to a server-side application, which categorizes documents based on the Web page's text and metadata entered by Web developers. On the client side, WebMap is a free browser plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer, which connects to the WebMap server and displays pages as icons on a map. The map is divided into oddly shaped, interconnecting regions, like territories on a chart. To look more closely at a region, you click to zoom in, which displays more sites from that region and then individual pages. You can see a demo at the WebMap site. The regions include Reference, Arts, Computers, Sports, News and Society. This common taxonomy is the same one used by the Open Directory Project, a Yahoo-like directory created by Web surfers. Each region contains icons. A legend in the browsing window shows icons that represent a standard Web page, a very popular page or one of your Internet Explorer Favorites. The icons and regions are superimposed over a Web topography. Concentric colored shapes represent traffic patterns. Higher traffic areas appear in warmer colors—yellows, oranges and reds. Lower traffic areas are displayed as greens and blues. Zooming into a region presents a more detailed view of the traffic patterns within that region.