Hi everyone,

I have been trying to do a parallel between space syntax techniques and current
information retrieval techniques in order to build a navigable urban grid of
the whole web or at least of a portion of it.  There are various motivations to
do this. In a link-based model, as the web is organized, there is very little
sense of place because the users don't have a view of where they are.
Following link to link, users can get quickly lost, and when there is an
underlying organization (usually local to the website) to help them, it tends
to be a hierarchy which has to be painfully learned. Also, browsing is slow
because you only make use of your cognitive abilities (not your perceptual
abilities) to figure out where to go.  Within a particular page there are many
links where you can go next and when you go to the next page you have this very
narrow view of where you came from or where you are going.

With a spatial organization, and in particular with a grid layout, I hope to
overcome some of these limitations.  In my view, the user would move down
corridors (streets?) where web pages would be tiled next to each other in
either side of the walls of the corridor.  Corridors would connect to other
corridors and presumably there would be enough navigational signs analogous to
street signs in cities.  The placement of the web pages in the corridors would
be such that if you look at all the trails that people take in the web, pages
near each other in the grid would be, on average, close to each other in the
trails.

An implicit assumption with this view is that web pages are locations, yet a
lot of web pages would not be considered locations but more navigational pages.
 Consider for example, the pages of the open directory, dmoz.  There, most of
the pages are really there for navigation and to access other web pages.  So, I
would have to make the distinction between web pages that can be considered as
locations or destinations and those that are navigational and these
navigational pages can be candidates for streets (the corridors).  There are
also groups of web pages (web sites really) linked to each other that attract
users with similar life styles and these users could be considered a community

around them.  In a form analogous to (some) real life streets, we should be
placing together all these pages in the same street so that you get synergy
between each other and support its corresponding community.

Assuming we have an "intelligible" grid layout, the user should be able to move
quickly through the corridors and also make use of his/her perceptual abilities
to look for information. Also, (again depends on a good layout), remembering
locations (pages) and learning a mental map becomes possible, making use of our
abilities to navigate in our (physical) urban spaces.  This organization might
even afford a real-time sense of place in much the same way as streets do in
that if the browsers (users) would see each other, presumably it would increase
the chances for interacting with each other in a meaningful context.  This
representation, of course, would be as a complement on the current web rather
than as a replacement and not every web page would have to be accounted for.

What I am working on is a way to use the latent information on the topology of
the web to figure out a good mapping for a grid layout of all or a partial set
of web pages.  If you consider how google works, they take the link information
within web pages and out of this link topology they can effectively figure out
which web pages would have the highest traffic.  Actually this is not quite
correct because they really calculate an authority measure (its pagerank), but
there are some alternative techniques that do predict the traffic flow, though
both measures are calculated with a similar effort.

When you do a search, they first figure out which pages have the keywords you
put in (again this is a bit simplified) and then they rank them using their
corresponding (global) pagerank.  The pagerank measures, on average, the
proportion of random surfers (i.e., start from a random page, and then select
one of the outlinks from the page in a random fashion) that you might find, at
any one time, in a page.  In addition, out of the pagerank calculation, you can
also derive an inverse distance measure between web pages (i.e., higher values
correspond to pages close by in the link topology and close by means that if
you consider all the web trails, then they would be close to each other in the
web trails that contain them).

In order to build the grid, I was making some parallels between web pages and
locations in a grid.  A natural parallel might be that high pagerank pages that
also work like hubs (they point to many other pages), would correspond to high
integration streets or lines in the grid (using the space syntax meaning of
integration).  Presumably, they have to be long lines and be shallow in terms
of accessibility.  As explained above, I have to decide when to place a page in
a street and when to make it one.  I probably have to make sure that the grid
is itself intelligible (using again the space syntax meaning).  I guess I was
thinking that a good grid layout would be such that if you do a space syntax
analysis, I should find that some measures (integration, visibility, ?) would
correlate well with their corresponding pagerank scores in that implicitly they
might be measuring similar behaviors.

I was hoping that people in this list might provide me with pointers to space
syntax literature I should look at and of issues that I should be aware of.
Some of the mappings that I don't know how to think of is when to decide to
link streets together and how to think of some of the ideas of the super grid
(that is, different levels of traffic in a grid).  I am assuming that the
psychological principles behind the navigation in a physical urban grid would
be similar to this generated grid and they should transfer over.  I guess from
the limited knowledge of the space syntax techniques that I have, I haven't
found much in terms of generative principles.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Baldo