Mapping the virtual geography of the World-Wide Web
In Fifth International World-Wide Web Conference, Paris.
This paper proposes a new framework for presenting information about virtual locations to the users of the World‐Wide Web in order to overcome the lost‐in‐cyberspace syndrome. A method has been developed and implemented to create a representation similar to geographical maps. Toward this end, self‐organizing maps (Kohonen neural networks) and a distance matrix method have been used to produce two‐dimensional maps with a distance‐representing relief structure for regions of the World‐Wide Web. The prototype actually permits creation of maps with up to several hundred resources depicted on them, but the method is scalable in its spirit. These maps are dynamic and show the location of the current resource in the map. They also allow you to jump to any resource that has been mapped. They therefore provide a new perception of the space we are navigating.
Girardin, Luc. 1996. “Mapping the Virtual Geography of the World-Wide Web.” In Fifth International World-Wide Web Conference, Paris.
@inproceedings{mapping-the-virtual-geography-of-the-world-wide-web,
author = {Luc Girardin},
title = {Mapping the virtual geography of the World-Wide Web},
booktitle = {Fifth International World-Wide Web Conference},
year = {1996},
location = {Paris},
abstract = {This paper proposes a new framework for presenting information about virtual locations to the users of the World-Wide Web in order to overcome the lost-in-cyberspace syndrome. A method has been developed and implemented to create a representation similar to geographical maps. Toward this end, self-organizing maps (Kohonen neural networks) and a distance matrix method have been used to produce two-dimensional maps with a distance-representing relief structure for regions of the World-Wide Web. The prototype actually permits creation of maps with up to several hundred resources depicted on them, but the method is scalable in its spirit. These maps are dynamic and show the location of the current resource in the map. They also allow you to jump to any resource that has been mapped. They therefore provide a new perception of the space we are navigating.},
keywords = {geography, lost-in-cyberspace, non-linear dimensionality reduction, self-organizing maps, visualization, World-Wide Web},
url = {http://www.girardin.org/luc/cgv/www5/},
status = {personal}
}