Mapping Cyberspace

"The map, whether exact or not, must be good enough to get one home. It must be sufficiently clear and well integrated to be economical of mental effort: the map must be readable. It should be safe, with a surplus of clues so that alternative actions are possible and the risk of failures is not too high... The image should preferably be open-ended, adaptable to change, allowing the individual to continue to investigate and organize reality: there should be blank spaces where he can extend the drawing for himself. Finally, it should in some measure be communicable to other individuals. The relative importance of these criteria for a "good" image will vary with different persons in different situations; one will prize an economical and sufficient system, another an open-ended and communicable one.."

'The Image of the City Kevin Lynch

"Cyberspace is a vast media matrix of the actual and the potential that incorporates the activities of telephone conversations, data transfer, electronic mail, computerized financial transactions, ATM transactions, on-line information services, video conferencing, the new mass media, virtual reality and so on. The strangeness, power, ubiquity and potential of this phenomenon has prompted commentators to see cyberspace as a kind of world in its own right"

Richard Coyne Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor

The recurring theme of this research constantly stresses the point that cyberspace is not one, but many spaces. It is many different things to different people but it is also many different things to the same person. Any map would need to reflect and represent these different aspects.

Approaching cyberspace from an informational need viewpoint, it would be useful to be able to group sites according to content and also in terms of how useful that content is for a given purpose. (This strategy recognises that the same content may be ranked differently depending on the users information need at that time. Therefore the system must be flexible enough to accommodate this.) If a line on say, a weather map, joining two areas of equal temperature is called an isotherm, then could we not establish a line on a cybermap joining two sites of equal informational content, and call it an isoterm?

Content ranking should be conducted by the user: a simple system would request a numerical ranking for each site. Content listing could be automated by a system which could extract the terms in the 'META' TAG, use an automatic indexing algorithm (derived from Salton's blueprint) and then represent similar sites in close proximity to each other to form clusters. Different subject areas should be colour coded for ease of recognition.

In addition to these clusters, some form of chronological history would also need to be stored (users like to know where they've been in case they want to get back there!).

Isoterms link different clusters of equal informational content as ranked by the user. These may be completely unconnected terms, but are considered of equal value.