INSPIRE: A New Method of Mapping Information Spaces

Information spaces such the WWW are the most challenging type of space that many people navigate during everyday life. Unlike the real world, there are no effective maps of information spaces, so people are forced to rely on search engines which are only suited to some types of retrieval task. This paper describes a new method for creating maps of information spaces, called INSPIRE. The INSPIRE engine is a tree drawing algorithm that uses a city metaphor, comprised of streets and buildings, and generates maps entirely automatically from webcrawl data. A technical evaluation was carried out using data from 112 universities, which had up to 485, 775 pages on their websites. Although they take longer to compute than radial layouts (e.g., the Bubble Tree), INSPIRE maps are much more compact. INSPIRE maps also have desirable aesthetic properties of being orthogonal, preserving symmetry between identical subtrees and being planar.