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Printer FriendlyReprinted with permission from Popular
Science, February 2000.
© Copyright, Times Mirror Magazines, Inc.
Web Mapper
IF YOU'VE EVER TYPED "Beatles" or "Shakespeare" into a search engine, you know the results can yield hundreds of thousands of entries. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Lab have created a visual solution to dot-com overload called WebTheme. The program categorizes huge numbers of returned documents graphically.
WebTheme works like this: Users provide a list of URLs and the system goes out and "harvests" the documents. It then performs a statistical analysis, creating a numerical signature for each document based on recurring words. Two visualization tools then help users analyze the findings. The first, ThemeView, shows users the results by presenting an image resembling a topographic map. Dominant themes appear as mountainous peaks. The second visualization tool, Galaxies, configures the same data as a type of star chart with each document-a docustar-appearing as a dot with similarly themed entries clustered together. Users can then click on the dot to open the document.
WebTheme grew out of a program call Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration that allowed researchers to review large numbers of documents. For now, WebTheme is only in limited use, but researchers are optimistic about its possible migration to the home computer.-Hank Schlesinger
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