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This paper examines the problems inherent in navigating the World-Wide Web. It discusses the work done by others in crafting techniques, software products, and research prototypes that attempt to improve the browsing experience through the application of information visualization in the form of sitemaps. This paper also describes an animated technique to generate previews and overviews of a web site in order to get a better understanding of its contents. The final section includes a technical description of an early prototype tool that uses this animated technique, with preliminary findings from an informal feasibility study involving 19 subjects. Keywords Web browsing; alternative user interfaces; web navigation; previews; overviews; web crawler; searching Context and Problem Statement The World-Wide Web is a constantly evolving maze of HTML, DHTML, XML, Java, JavaScript, CGI, Active Server Pages, Shockwave, Flash, and other means of generating hypertext content. It is an extremely ...

This chapter describes the design, development and testing of one component of a system for creating generally applicable, data-driven sitemap tools and information retrieval applications. This category of software tools are used to enhance information seeking on the web. Such tools are set up by web site administrators who want to provide visitors with alternative browsing and navigation aids. The Generalized Relation Browser, or GRB, illustrates the look-ahead strategy for web navigation within the Agileviews framework. Agileviews define control mechanisms and interfaces for overviews, previews, reviews, peripheral views, and shared views intended to help people make better decisions while seeking information on the Internet. Within this framework, the overall goal of the GRB is to help users to gain a better understanding of collections of online resources by providing them with a kind of sitemap. The GRB is the follow-on to the Federal Statistics Relation Browser prototype, which focused on the US Government Fedstats collection of web sites, providing users a more dynamic and informative browsing alternative to the static sitemap.