MAPA: A System for Inducing and Visualizing Hierarchy in Websites

The MAPA system provides improved navigation facility for large web sites. It extracts a hierarchical structure from an arbitrary web site, with some minimal user assistance, and creates an interactive map of that site that can be used for orientation and navigation. MAPA is designed and most useful for large web sites of from 500 to 50,000 pages. We present an overview of the mapping problem, with a list of 10 important user facilities that maps can offer. Then we describe how the MAPA system analyzes the link structure of a site, and provides effective aids for the navigation of large hypertexts. We also compare MAPA with a number of other web-mapping systems, and conclude with a review of how MAPA stands with respect to our wish-list of map features.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: HT
• Authors: David G. Durand, Paul Kahn
• Keywords: HT 1998, Internet Technology, Large Web Sites, MAPA, Web Sites