Quantum web fields and molecular meanderings: visualising web visitations

Abstract

This paper describes two visualisation algorithms that give an impression of current activity on a web site. Both focus on giving a sense of the trail of individual visitors within the web space and showing their navigation paths. Past web activity is used to produce a spatial mapping of pages, which results in highly traversed page links lying close together in the 2D visualisation space. Pages visited by typical individual visitors thus form intelligible paths when plotted in the visualisation space. Both techniques attempt to enhance user awareness and experience, but they differ in their balance between utility and aesthetics.