A Study On The Mechanism Of WWW Information Navigation

The information on WWW is out-of-order so that people often meet some problems such as the disorientation and overload recognition, which needs badly information navigation to help people acquire and utilize WWW information. In nature, WWW information navigation is an effective access strategy for large information resources, which can help users orientate themselves in the process of information search and can lead users to their targets accurately and swiftly. In form, it is the means for orderly displaying the content and structure of information resources on WWW. At the same time, it's a kind of information services for leading users to achieve their targets successfully and accurately.This paper concentrates on the mechanism of WWW information navigation, and discusses some essential problems about information navigation. The 5 main mechanisms of WWW information navigation are summed up. And the technology of visualization for information navigation and navigation strategies are discussed too. It is pointed out that the performance of existing WWW information navigation can be optimized if we improve users education, the designing of information structure and deeply exploration of information content.This paper is divided into 6 parts, and the main content is as following. 1 Introduction to WWW information navigationSome navigation methods used in physical world can be utilized on WWW though there are some differences between WWW information space and physical world. Based on the analysis of navigation in physical word and in WWW information space, this paper discusses emergence and the definition of WWW information navigation. WWW information navigation is "locomotion + wayfinding" in form, and "information access strategy" in nature. The locomotion represents the switch between WWW pages, and wayfinding can be considered as the information seeking behavior such as search, browsing and so on. The recognition foundation of WWW information navigation and the relationship among WWW information navigation, information architecture and information retrieval are also explored detailedly. The recognition theory, especially the theory of cognitive map, is closely bound up with WWW information navigation. The author figures out that information architecture is one of the basic theories of WWW information navigation, and the core contents of information architecture have a lot common with the problems that WWWinformation navigation tries to solve. As far as information retrieval is concerned, it is different from information navigation because information retrieval pays more attention to "search" but navigation to "leading". However, under some circumstances, information retrieval and information navigation are consistent.2 Basic mechanism of WWW information navigationThe paper considers that the existing WWW information navigation methods and navigation strategy represents 5 basic navigation mechanisms, that is, hyperlink-based navigation mechanism, content-based navigation mechanism, time mechanism, spatial navigation mechanism and social navigation mechanism. Hyperlink-based navigation mechanism emphasizes on the direction of link. The link between nodes provides navigation route for users. As the hyperlink determines the navigation route, how to build the link scientifically becomes the key problem. Content-based navigation mechanism is the main navigation mechanism nowadays, which utilizes the content property of information for navigation. On one side, keywords can represent some information content so that the information with the same keywords are some content-related. On the other side, semantic description of information can represent the information content deeply. Therefore, the paper puts forward that content-based navigation mechanism includes keyword- based navigation and semantics-based navigation. However, keywords can only represent the simple content, which easily dissever the relevancy of the content. The deep-content representation and application are not developed, so semantic navigation is not satisfied at present. Time mechanism is a kind of navigation mechanisms that uses time for the signpost, and determines navigation route according to the time of occurrence. Spatial navigation mechanism provides navigation information with spatial property, which makes applications for the structure with space characteristics. Social mechanism provides navigation information with others 'experience and suggestions, which mainly makes applications for recommendation systems and collaborative systems before, and now for formal information retrieval systems, such as in CNKI knowledge network service system (CNS 5.0). The analysis of 5 navigation mechanisms is one of the innovations for the paper.3 Visual assistant mechanism of WWW information navigationAs a technique, visualization is in favor of the presentation of navigation elements and navigation structure, which can be helpful to alleviates the users' burden of recognition and can strengthen the clarity and interaction of navigation. This part mainly analyzes how visualization assists WWW information navigation. And some technologies of visualization which supportWWW information navigation, are introduced too. The author selects and analyzes three examples of visual navigation in this part.4 Strategy of WWW information navigationWWW information navigation strategy is the demonstration of WWW information navigation mechanism. The author divides navigation strategies into 2 sorts, that is, the strategy provided by browsers and the strategy provided by websites. The former mainly supports direct search and page revisit, and latter mainly includes structure-based navigation strategy, content-based navigation strategy and graph-based navigation strategy. The author puts forward that personalized navigation strategy based on users' needs, and consider that users should choose the appropriate navigation strategy for different tasks. Based on this, the paper concludes that the designers of navigation should apply different navigation strategies synthetically for different targets.5 Optimization of WWW information navigationThe part considers that users such as users' knowledge background, users 'experience, users' information capacity, users' space capacity and users' skills for using WWW, information structure of WWW and navigation mechanism are main factors which affect the performance of the existing navigation tools. Therefore, the paper points out that we should take some measures to optimize the performance of WWW information navigation. The author thinks that there are at least three ways which include users education, improvement to information structure and to navigation mechanism. This paper introduces information architecture theory and ontology technology, and tries to optimize the structure and navigation mechanism of WWW. As far as the improvement of the navigation mechanism concerned, an ontology-based semantic navigation model which tries to add deep semantics to navigation is discussed. The improvement of WWW information navigation is also an innovation of this paper.6 ConclusionThis part summarizes the contents of the whole paper and forecasts the trend of WWW information navigation. The author concludes that some new technologies such as ontology, semantic web and so on, will strengthen the semantics of WWW information navigation. And the author also thinks that personalized navigation, intelligent navigation and semantic navigation will be the emphasis in the near future. At last, the author believes that the function of WWW information navigation will be improved greatly in future, as the WWW information navigation theory and its practice develops, and can play its role in "helping users find WWW informationswiftly and efficiently".The paper is the production of the project of study on the mechanism of Intelligent navigation based on information architecture (Number: 03JB870002) which is sponsored by Ministry of Education of People's Republic of China.(Graphs 45; tables 10)...