Up: Webspace Visualization

Webspace Visualization

by Ed H. Chi
Research Assistant, Computer Science Department
Former-Apprentice, The Geometry Center, University of Minnesota


'Webspace' is a program developed to visualize the connections between HTML documents. It takes a URL to a HTML document on the command line, and write out several WebOOGL files for the visualization. The WebOOGL file can then be viewed with Geomview.

If you have the WebOOGL package set up correctly, you can click here to get the example file shown here that visualizes the
Geometry Center Home Page

The following image is a snapshot of a typical output of 'Webspace'. It is a visualization of the webspace starting at the Geometry Center Home Page, and it goes two levels deep. The visualization is limited to HTML documents on the www.geom.umn.edu server only.

In the image above, the red tetrahedron in the middle is the 0th level (the Geometry Center Home Page). The green tetrahedra are the 1st level HTML documents that are reached by the robot from the home page. The blue tetrahedra are the 2nd level documents that are reachable from the 1st level ones. Here is another view of the same WebOOGL file.


When I click on one of the tetrahedra, the corresponding HTML document is displayed via Mosaic. However, without any labels, it is relatively difficult to determine which tetrahedron corresponds with which document. Therefore, labels for various levels is provided via "embedded objects". For example, if I were to click on the cube marked "level one labels":

Then I would get something like this:

Notice that each level 1 tetrahedra are now labeled with its corresponding Title.

Here is an example of WebOOGL in action:

Clicking on the green tetrahedron in the upper left hand corner brings up my Linux article! :)




The above WebOOGL example was prepared by running:

"webspace -s www.geom.umn.edu http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/"

Click here for info on the implementation of 'Webspace'.

Here is a file that visualizes the my personal home page.

This was done with "webspace http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/people/chi.html" command.


Up: Webspace Visualization

[HOME] The Geometry Center Home Page

Comments to: webmaster@www.geom.uiuc.edu
Created: Jun 18 1995 --- Last modified: Apr 26 1996