Intro Motivation Visualizations Design Requirements Documents Related Work
A screen shot of the current system prototype is shown below:
Webwatch is programmed in Java using the Swing user interface toolkit. The components of the prototype are as follows:
Groups of people:
Each person belongs to a particular group. The image above shows
a current group expanded to show its members, represented by dark tick
marks. A thumbnail and the name of the person appears to the left
of the tickmark.
Domains of web pages:
Each web page being monitored belongs to a particular domain.
A domain is defined as having a set of web pages organized in a particular
way: alphabetical by URL, by person, or by top-level domain (e.g. *.edu
is one top-level domain). Unexpanded domains are represented by thick
tickmarks and the domain label to the right of the tickmark. Expanded
domains show the web pages contained within that domain as thin tickmarks
and the URL as a label to the right.
Expansions of groups and domains:
A person uses her mouse to select and deselect groups and domains with
a single click. The user can have multiple groups and domains expanded
for detailed examination. Unexpanded groups and domains are still
visible but rendered smaller than normal (called the "fisheye" technique
in information visualization).
Mappings between people and web pages:
Lines expand from groups and people over to the webpages and domains
that they monitor. When a group or domain is not expanded, a user
moving her mouse over the group or domain causes mappings to be drawn temporarily.
When a group or domain is expanded, its mappings are drawn for the duration
of that expansion.
Mouse-overs:
A user can use the mouse to "hover" over an individual URL in order
to see a thumbnail image of that URL. Lines are also drawn between
the current URL and any person who looks at that URL. The current
URL that the mouse hovers over is highlighted on the domain axis with a
bold box around its tickmark.
Toolbar functionality:
The toolbar to the left of the application window provides a control
center for the user. The user can sort the webpages either alphabetically,
by person, or by domain. Webpages can be viewed either as URLs with
thumbnails-on-demand, or as thumbnails with a textual URL-on-demand, controlled
by the mouse.
Searching:
A searching function is also provided on the toolbar that allows a
user to further filter URLs to those matching a keyword search. An
image of what a search looks like appears below:
