Dynamic structuring of web information for access visualization

ABSTRACT

The Internet has led to the formation of a global information infrastructure. To explore a web site, a site map would be useful as a short cut for a user to locate for the target information in a structured and efficient manner, rather than drilling into the web site following hyperlinks, reading possibly irrelevant information. Useless information impacts a mobile web environment, where mobile clients are only connected with unreliable wireless channels of limited bandwidth. Structured web page organization at the web server proxy is an important issue to resolve to provide efficient browsing experience for web clients, while minimizing the browsing of unrelated pages or sites. In this paper, we adopt the Document Information Extraction mechanism to construct a document cluster dynamically and intelligently with respect to a requested root web page. The document cluster works like a dynamic site map, spanning across several web sites. The clusters are generated and stored in XML format at proxy server so that it can potentially benefit a large number of mobile clients. Clients process the XML clusters and transform them to be visualized through VRML or DOM. For VRML, a transformer is built at the client-side to support a three-dimensional modeling view. For DOM, JavaScript is used for accessing the parsed XML data to produce a two-dimensional tree output.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Clustering

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Software psychology
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
DOM, VRML, XML, visualization, web document structure