WebVis: A Hierarchical Web Home Page Visualizer

WebVis, the Hierarchical Web Home Page Visualizer, is a tool for managing home web pages. The user can access this tool via the World Wide Web and obtain a hierarchical visualization of one's home web pages. WebVis is a real time interactive tool that supports many different queries on the statistics of internal files such as size, age, and type. In addition, statistics on embedded information such as VRML files, Java applets, images and sound files can be extracted and queried. Results of these queries are visualized using color, shape and size of different nodes of the hierarchy. The visualization assists the user in a variety of tasks, such as quickly finding outdated information or locate large files. WebVis is one solution to the growing web space maintenance problem. Implementation of WebVis is realized with Perl and Java. Perl pattern matching and file handling routines are used to collect and process web space linkage information and web document information. Java utilizes the collected information to produce visualizations of the web space. Java also provides WebVis with red time interactivity, while running off the WWW. Some WebVis examples of home web page visualization are presented.