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: (1) we replaced the Web page with the Web site as the basic unit of interaction and analysis;(2) we defined a new informationstructure, the clan graph, that groups together sets of related sites; (3) 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; and (4) 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 of this approach. The clan graph construction algorithm tends to filter out irrelevant sites and discover additional relevant items. The auditorium visualization, augmented with drill-down capabilities to explore site profile data, helps users to find high-quality sites as well as sites that serve a particular function.

REFERENCES

• 1: Brian Amento , Will Hill , Loren Terveen , Deborah Hix , Peter Ju, An empirical evaluation of user interfaces for topic management of Web sites, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.552-559, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.303156]
• 2: Michelle Q. Wang Baldonado , Terry Winograd, SenseMaker: an information-exploration interface supporting the contextual evolution of a user's interests, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.11-18, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258563]
• 3: BEDERSON, B. B., HOLLAN, J. D., PERLIN, K., MEYER, J., BACON, D., AND FURNAS, G. 1996. Pad++: A zoomable graphical sketchpad for exploring alternate interface physics. J. Visual Lang. Comput. 7, 3-31.
• 4: Krishna Bharat , Monika R. Henzinger, Improved algorithms for topic distillation in a hyperlinked environment, Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.104-111, August 24-28, 1998, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/290941.290972]
• 5: Rodrigo A. Botafogo , Ehud Rivlin , Ben Shneiderman, Structural analysis of hypertexts: identifying hierarchies and useful metrics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.10 n.2, p.142-180, April 1992 [doi>10.1145/146802.146826]
• 6: Stuart K. Card , George G. Robertson , William York, The WebBook and the Web Forager: an information workspace for the World-Wide Web, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.111-ff., April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238446]
• 7: S. Jeromy Carrière , Rick Kazman, WebQuery: searching and visualizing the Web through connectivity, Selected papers from the sixth international conference on World Wide Web, p.1257-1267, September 1997, Santa Clara, California, United States
• 8: CHAKRABARTI, S., DOM, B. E., GIBSON, D., KUMAR, S. R., RAGHAVAN, P., RAJAGOPALAN, S., AND TOMKINS, A. 1998. Experiments in Topic Distillation. In ACM SIGIR Workshop on Hypertext Information Retrieval on the Web (Melbourne, Australia). ACM Press, New York, NY.
• 9: George W. Furnas, Effective view navigation, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.367-374, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258800]
• 10: GARFIELD, E. 1979. Citation Indexing. Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, PA.
• 11: Ron R. Hightower , Laura T. Ring , Jonathan I. Helfman , Benjamin B. Bederson , James D. Hollan, Graphical multiscale Web histories: a study of padprints, Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems, p.58-65, June 20-24, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276627.276634]
• 12: Will Hill , Loren Terveen, Using frequency-of-mention in public conversations for social filtering, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.106-112, November 16-20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/240080.240229]
• 13: JACKSON, M. H. 1997. Assessing the structure of communication on the World Wide Web. J. Comput. Mediat. Commun. 3, I (June).
• 14: Eser Kandogan , Ben Shneiderman, Elastic Windows: a hierarchical multi-window World-Wide Web browser, Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.169-177, October 14-17, 1997, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/263407.263541]
• 15: Jon M. Kleinberg, Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, Proceedings of the ninth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms, p.668-677, January 25-27, 1998, San Francisco, California, United States
• 16: John Lamping , Ramana Rao , Peter Pirolli, A focus+context technique based on hyperbolic geometry for visualizing large hierarchies, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.401-408, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223956]
• 17: Jock D. Mackinlay , Ramana Rao , Stuart K. Card, An organic user interface for searching citation links, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.67-73, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223913]
• 18: Yoelle S. Maarek , Michal Jacovi , Menachem Shtalhaim , Sigalit Ur , Dror Zernik , Israel Z. Ben-Shaul, WebCutter: a system for dynamic and tailorable site mapping, Selected papers from the sixth international conference on World Wide Web, p.1269-1279, September 1997, Santa Clara, California, United States
• 19: Massimo Marchiori, The quest for correct information on the Web: hyper search engines, Selected papers from the sixth international conference on World Wide Web, p.1225-1235, September 1997, Santa Clara, California, United States
• 20: Sougata Mukherjea , James D. Foley, Visualizing the World-Wide Web with the navigational view builder, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, v.27 n.6, p.1075-1087, April 1995
• 21: Sougata Mukherjea , James D. Foley , Scott Hudson, Visualizing complex hypermedia networks through multiple hierarchical views, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.331-337, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223947]
• 22: James Pitkow , Peter Pirolli, Life, death, and lawfulness on the electronic frontier, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.383-390, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258805]
• 23: Peter Pirolli , James Pitkow , Ramana Rao, Silk from a sow's ear: extracting usable structures from the Web, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.118-125, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238450]
• 24: Peter Pirolli , Patricia Schank , Marti Hearst , Christine Diehl, Scatter/gather browsing communicates the topic structure of a very large text collection, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.213-220, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238489]
• 25: Paul Resnick , Hal R. Varian, Recommender systems, Communications of the ACM, v.40 n.3, p.56-58, March 1997 [doi>10.1145/245108.245121]
• 26: SCOTT, J. 1991. Social Network Analysis: A Handbook. Sage Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA.
• 27: Ellen Spertus, ParaSite: mining structural information on the Web, Selected papers from the sixth international conference on World Wide Web, p.1205-1215, September 1997, Santa Clara, California, United States
• 28: Loren Terveen , Will Hill, Evaluating emergent collaboration on the Web, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.355-362, November 14-18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/289444.289510]
• 29: Loren Terveen , Will Hill, Finding and visualizing inter-site clan graphs, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.448-455, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/274644.274705]
• 30: Loren G. Terveen , William C. Hill , Brian Amento , David McDonald , Josh Creter, Building task-specific interfaces to high volume conversational data, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.226-233, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258712]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Navigation

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
cocitation analysis, collaborative filtering, computer supported cooperative work, information visualization, social filtering, social network analysis