Using VRML-based visualisations to facilitate information retrieval in the world wide web

With the explosive growth of information in the WWW, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to find information of interest. Visualisations may be helpful in assisting the users in their information retrieval task. Effective visualisation of the structure of a WWW site is extremely useful for browsing through the site. Visualisation can also be used to augment a WWW search engine when too many or too few results are retrieved. In this paper, we discuss several visualisations we have developed to facilitate information retrieval on the WWW. With VRML becoming the standard for graphics on the Web and efficient VRML browsers becoming available, VRML was used for developing these visualisations. Unique visualisations like focus + context views of WWW nodes and semantic visualisation are presented and examples are given on scenarios where the visualisations are useful.