Hypermedia Exploration with Interactive Dynamic Maps1

Interactive Dynamic Maps (IDMs) help users interactively explore webs of hypermedia documents. IDMs provide automatically-generated abstract graphical views at different levels of granularity. Visual cues give users a better understanding of the content of the web, which results in better navigation control and more accurate and effective expression of queries. IDMs consist of: topic maps, which provide visual abstractions of the semantic content of a web of documents and document maps, which provide visual abstractions of subsets of documents. The major contributions of this work include 1) automatic techniques for building maps directly from a web of documents, including extraction of semantic content and use of a spatial metaphor for generating layout and filling space, 2) a direct manipulation interaction paradigm for exploring webs of documents, using maps and an integrated graphical query language, and 3) the ability to use the maps themselves as documents that can be customized, stored in a library and shared among users.