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Content

The View From Above Browsing for a particular piece on information on the Web can often feel like being stuck in an unfamiliar part of town walking around at street level looking for a particular store. You know the store is around there somewhere, but your viewpoint at ground level is constrained. What you really want is to get above the streets, hovering half a mile or so up in the air, to see the whole neighbourhood. This kind of birds-eye view function has been memorably described by David D. Clark, Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and the Chairman of the Invisible Worlds Protocol Advisory Board, as the missing "up button" on the browser [3] . ET-Map is a nice example of a prototype for Clark's "up-button" view of an information space. The goal of information maps, like ET-Map, is to provide the browser with a sense of the lie of the information landscape, what is where, the location of clusters and hotspots, what is related to what. Ideally, this 'big-picture' all-in-one visual summary needs to fit on a single standard computer screen. ET-Map is one of my favourite examples, but there are many other interesting information maps being developed by other researchers and companies (see inset at the bottom of this page). How does ET-Map work? Here is a sequence of screenshots of a typical browsing session with ET-Map, which ends with access to Web pages on jazz musician Miles Davis. You can also tryout ET-Map for yourself, using a fully working demo on the AI Lab's website [4] . We begin with the top-level map showing forty odd broad entertainment 'subject regions' represented by regularly shaped tiles. Each tile is a visual summary of a group of Web pages with similar content. These tiles are shaded different colours to differentiate them, while labels identify the subject of the tile and the number in brackets telling you how many individual Web page links it contains. ET-Map uses two important, but common-sense, spatial concepts in its organisation and representation of the Web. Firstly, the 'subject regions' size is directly related to the number of Web pages in that category. For example, the 'MUSIC' subject area contains over 11,000 pages and so has a much larger area than the neighbouring area of 'LIVE' which only has 4,300 odd pages. This is intuitively meaningful, as the largest tiles are visually more prominent on the map and are likely to be more significant as they contain the most links. In addition, a second spatial concept, that of neighbourhood proximity, is applied so 'subject regions' closely related in term of content are plotted close to each other on the map. For example, 'FILM' and 'YEAR'S OSCARS', at the bottom left, are neighbours in both semantic and spatial space. This make senses as many things in the real-world are ordered in this way, with things that are alike being spatially close together (e.g. layout of goods in a store, or books in a library). Importantly, ET-Map is also a multi-layer map, with sub-maps showing greater informational resolution through a finer degree of categorization. So for any subject region that contains more than two hundred Web pages, a second-level map, with more detailed categories is generated. This subdivision of information space is repeated down the hierarchy as far as necessary. In the example, the user selected the 'MUSIC' subject region which, not surprisingly, contained many thousands of pages. A second-level map with numerous different music categories is then presented to the user. Delving deeper, the user wants to learn more about jazz music, so clicking on the 'JAZZ' tile leads to a third-level map, a fine-grained map of jazz related Web pages. Finally, selecting the 'MILES DAVIS' subject region leads to more a conventional looking ranking of pages from which the user selects one to download.