Visualizing the Structure of the World
Wide Web in 3D Hyperbolic Space
Tamara Munzner
and
Paul Burchard
Proceedings of
VRML '95,
(San Diego, California, December 14-15, 1995), special issue of
Computer Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH, New York, 1995, pp. 33-38.
Abstract
We visualize the structure of sections of the World Wide Web by
constructing graphical representations in 3D hyperbolic space. The
felicitous property that hyperbolic space has ``more room'' than
Euclidean space allows more information to be seen amid less clutter,
and motion by hyperbolic isometries provides for mathematically
elegant navigation. The 3D graphical representations, available in the
WebOOGL or VRML file formats, contain link anchors which point to the original
pages on the Web itself. We use the Geomview/WebOOGL 3D Web browser as
an interface between the 3D representation and the actual documents on
the Web. The Web is just one example of a hierarchical tree structure
with links ``back up the tree'' i.e. a directed graph which contains
cycles. Our information visualization techniques are appropriate for
other types of directed graphs with cycles, such as filesystems with
symbolic links.
Additional information
Versions of the paper:
Figures:
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Figure 1:
Using the WebOOGL system for information visualization in
hyperbolic space.
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Figure 2: Euclidean conetree, showing two levels of the 1994 Geometry
Center Web.
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Figure 3: Motion in hyperbolic space (the projective model).
WebOOGL [120 KB]
VRML [250 KB]
MPEG [900 KB]
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Figure 4: The projective, conformal, and ``insider'' models of
hyperbolic space.
WebOOGL [50KB]
VRML [110KB]
MPEG projective [1.15MB]
MPEG conformal [700KB]
MPEG insider [360KB]
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Figure 6: No backlinks.
WebOOGL [60KB]
VRML [130KB]
MPEG [200KB]
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Figure 7: Breadth-first search.
WebOOGL [200KB]
VRML [300KB]
MPEG [200KB]
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Figure 8: Depth-first search.
WebOOGL [130KB]
VRML [300KB]
MPEG [1.02MB]
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Figure 9: Filesystem visualization.
WebOOGL [330KB]
VRML [770KB]
MPEG [380KB]
High Resolution TIFF Figures:
1,
2,
3a,
3b,
3c,
3d,
4a,
4b,
4c,
6,
7,
8,
9
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Copyright notice
Last modified: Mon Sep 23 21:40:14 PDT 2002
munzner@graphics.stanford.edu
