3D visualization of WWW semantic content for browsing and query formulation

Visualization is a promising technique for both enhancing users' perception of structure in the Internet and providing navigation facilities for its large information spaces. This paper describes an application of the Document Explorer to the visualization of WWW content structure. The system provides visualization, browsing, and query formulation mechanisms based on documents' semantic content. These mechanisms complement text and link-based search by supplying a visual search and query formulation environment using semantic associations among documents. The user can view and interact with visual representations of WWW document relations to traverse this derived document space. The relationships among individual keywords in the documents are also represented visually to support query formulation by direct manipulation of content words in the document set. A suite of navigation and orientation tools is provided which focuses on orientation and navigation using the visual representations of document set and term collection. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.