How can information maps help on the Web?

The basic problem of helping users identify "where they are" and "what information is here" was discussed in detail. Information maps/overview diagrams are one solution.

Human-constructed maps were considered better than automatically generated maps. But the key is giving content providers the tools to make the maps.

We saw lots of examples of maps provided by the Hyper-G system. But it was stressed that we need to understand users tasks better and how each type of map can aid each kind of task.

More structure needs to be added to the Web so that the generation of these maps can be more automated.


instone@acm.org / 96-05-07