Visualizing the World Wide Web

We discuss some principles that we believe are important in creating useful visualizations of the World Wide Web. They are: layout, abstraction, focus, and interaction. We illustrate these points with examples from the work of our group at the University of Toronto. Introduction The World Wide Web[BLCL + 94] is a large distributed hypermedia network implemented on the global Internet. To give an idea of the size of this network, as of early 1996 one popular index server reports having indexed 21 million Web pages[Cor96]. Not surprisingly, many researchers have proposed visualization as a technology to address the severe problems of disorientation and information overload that are caused by interacting with such a large and chaotic information space. See, for example, [Doe94, And95, AS95, GS95, TL95, HDWB95, MDH95]. In this paper we discuss some principles, based on our experience with information visualization in other domains as well as in the Web domain, that we believe are impor..