Visualizing rich, structured hypermedia

Very large hypermedia collections, say many thousands of documents and links, are often unmanageable. Users can have considerable difficulty finding particular information and comprehending its extent and scope. Support for explicit hierarchical structure of the collection, such as the Yahoo classification scheme, helps users by suggesting specific paths through the information space. Such hierarchical structure can also be visualized, either independently from, or in association with, the associative hyperlinks between individual documents. Furthermore, the availability of rich metadata fields for collections and individual documents, including attributes such as author, title, size, keywords, and creation date, permits enhancing visualizations by mapping attribute values to aspects of the visual presentation. The author discusses visualization techniques that were developed for the Hyperwave information server.