Visualizing Web Navigation Data with Polygon Graphs

As the volume of digitally accessible information grows, there is increasing pressure on the development of data visualization methods to enable humans to interpret that data. We provide a description of our WebViz system, as a tool to visualize both the structure and usage of web sites. We illustrate the use of our visualization paradigm by introducing polygonal graphs layered on top of our adaptation of radial disk trees. In our system, the structure of a web segment is rendered as a radial tree, and usage data can be extracted and layered as polygonal graphs. By interactively creating and adjusting these layers, a user can develop real time insight into the data. We present the system, show the idea of interactive visual operators, and provide some examples that help show the value of the specific visualization techniques, as well as the interactive use of those techniques.