Creating a Web Analysis and Visualization Environment
This addresses information management challenges for web users, but it appears incremental as an interface enhancement.
The paper tackles the problem of resource discovery on the rapidly growing World Wide Web by introducing WAVE, a 3D interface for information visualization and browsing, which uses concept analysis to cluster and categorize documents based on attributes like location and keywords.
Due to the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, resource discovery becomes an increasing problem. As an answer to the demand for information management, a third generation of World-Wide Web tools will evolve: information gathering and processing agents. This paper describes WAVE (Web Analysis and Visualization Environment), a 3D interface for World-Wide Web information visualization and browsing. It uses the mathematical theory of concept analysis to conceptually cluster objects, and to create a three-dimensional layout of information nodes. So-called "conceptual scales" for attributes, such as location, title, keywords, topic, size, or modification time, provide a formal mechanism that automatically classifies and categorizes documents, creating a conceptual information space. A visualization shell serves as an ergonomically sound user interface for exploring this information space.