A Visualization Model for Web Sitemaps

This paper describes a space-efficient visualization model that automatically crawls through a website and visualizes its sitemap. This model can be used especially for displaying and navigating a very large website in a two-dimensional (2D) plane and/or a three-dimensional (3D) space. The 2D visualization employs EncCon layout algorithm to effectively visualize a very large number of pages and relations at once in which it utilizes the space to display more information. This technique also employs a focus+context navigation method to enable the exploration of large sites. Animation is provided to preserve the user’s mental map while exploring the website hierarchy. The 3D visualization extends the 2D EncCon layout algorithm to a three-dimensional space which aims to provide a more realistic look and feel of the information.