Creating a Web Analysis and Visualization Environment

Abstract: Due to the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, resource discovery becomes an increasing problem. As an answer to the demand for information management, a third generation of World-Wide Web tools will evolve: information gathering and processing agents. This paper describes WAVE (Web Analysis and Visualization Environment), a 3D interface for World-Wide Web information visualization and browsing. It uses the mathematical theory of concept analysis to conceptually cluster objects, and to create a three-dimensional layout of information nodes. So-called "conceptual scales" for attributes, such as location, title, keywords, topic, size, or modification time, provide a formal mechanism that automatically classifies and categorizes documents, creating a conceptual information space. A visualization shell serves as an ergonomically sound user interface for exploring this information space.