Cyberspace geography visualization

1. Introduction

As we can move in our real world, we can wander in cyberspace. In this virtual world, people are able to navigate through "a common mental geography", "a nowhere space" or "a consensual hallucination". This space is multidimensional and therefore seems considerably different from the notions of physical space that many of us have. This multidimensionality makes it very difficult to determine the overall structure of the World-Wide Web. Since information about the orientation is globally poor, the so-called lost-in-cyberspace syndrome has become an important problem, limiting the cyberspace navigability.

Through its maps and more recently satellite imaging, geography,[2] has played a major role in the analysis of human activity. People are easily able to explore cities and navigate through countries they have never visited before thanks to geographic tools. Although the physical earth has been completely mapped, no such maps exist for cyberspace.

Visualization[3] creates the possibility of communicating large amounts of information to the human visual system. If information about an emergent topology of the World-Wide Web can be found, an approximate representation can be built in a dimension appropriate for visualization.

The project presented here describes how the geographical features of cyberspace can be extracted and visualized. To this end, the following chapters develop a mapping of the World-Wide Web in a medium of low dimension in order to help people have visual information about virtual locations.