A graphical aid for Web navigation

Today's hypertext systems, such as the WWW, involve large information spaces and inadequate user interfaces. Disorientation and cognitive overhead are important problems in web navigation. Information personalization is important for personal management of web information. Many researchers have addressed these problems; solutions fall into two categories: static methods and dynamic methods. The former provides a static image of all documents in a specified web site. In contrast, dynamic methods interactively build a history of visited web sites.; In this thesis, we develop a graphical navigation tool, referred to as CZWebR, which makes use of a hybrid approach by integrating static web structure into a dynamic navigation history map. CZWebR also presents on the fly, in response to user's requests, the underlying link structure of each visited web page along with visualizations of reference relationships among visited web pages. CZWebR also helps manage the complexity of web information on the Internet for individual and collaborative use. The Continuous Zoom algorithm, a detail-in-context technique, is utilized to improve the graphical presentation of the history map. This work combines both advanced visualization methods and HCI methodology. CZWebR is implemented for the Windows95/98/NT platform and written in C++.