Visualising Web Visitations: a probabilistic approach

Geoff Ellis
Huddersfield University, UK.
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/ellisg2/

  

Alan Dix
Lancaster University, UK
http://www.hcibook.com/alan/

IV04, 14-15 July 2004, London, UK.

Abstract

This paper presents a technique, the Quantum Web Field, designed to give an ambient visualisation of the current activity on a web site. It uses the paths of past visitors to the site and a self-organising map to build a diffuse 'probabilistic' mapping of pages to cells in a 2D matrix, where highly traversed page-links tend to be closer to each other. The paths of current visitors appear as intelligible trails giving a sense of purposeful human activity rather than offering detailed analysis. The visualisation is not constrained by either the complexity or the number of pages in the site.

keywords: web visualisation, awareness, self-organising map

Full reference:
G. Ellis and A. Dix (2004). Visualising Web Visitations: a probabilistic approach. Proceedings of IV04, IEEE Computing Society. pp. 599-604
http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/
iv04-web/
more:
Download draft paper (PDF, 65K)
see companion paper Quantum Web Fields And Molecular Meanderings - Visualising Web Visitations at AVI2004
related work on visualisation at: http://www.hcibook.com/alan/topics/vis/

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http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/iv04-web/

Alan Dix 22/5/2004