Faceted HyperTrees
The problem of Web site navigation is conceptual, technical, spatial,
philosophical and logistic. Consequently, solutions tend to call for
complex improvisational combinations of art, science and organizational
psychology.
-- Tim Horgan,
Webmaster - Finding the Way.
The fundamental issue for a web reference site
is to create a solid and usable 'classification system'.
From the outset of The WDVL I've been thinking about the most
appropriate structure; originally I founded it on the client/server
paradigm, with only three major classes:
Client side, Server side, and Internet/miscellaneous.
This proved to be too coarse to be very useful,
and after a little research into
library and software classification
techniques and a lot of experimentation and
introspection I came up with the present system, exemplified
essentially
by the table on the home page (except that HTML belongs under Authoring
but is factored out because of it's importance).
A HyperTree is essentially a hierarchical navigation structure
with arbitrary cross-links. It merges the benefits of the familiar
hierarchical organisation with those of the richly-connected web.
The hierarchical structure forms the major 'backbone' to guide the
user's intuitions about the site, while the cross-links create
'shortcuts'.
No sufficiently powerful classification system is 'perfect' (sounds
like a
Goedelian theorem
lurking here!) and I'm sure that mine shouldn't
be cast in stone, but it's a very important and pervasive foundation for
The WDVL in its present form. Assume the following categories as the
'axioms' of webspace:
| Category |
Abstraction |
Examples |
| Authoring |
Process |
Writing HTML or CGI programs |
| Location |
Identity |
Resource discovery |
| Software |
Object or Agent |
Tools for authoring or location |
| Multimedia |
Substance |
Stuff for making a web object |
| Internet |
Context |
History, and other items peripheral to WWW |
| Reference |
Location |
Items spanning the other categories, e.g. The Library. |
This scheme was mostly influenced by
faceted classification
from
library science and software reuse projects; each category represents a
facet or aspect.
For example, 'Java' can be found in several of those
categories, depending on whether you are interested in
writing Java (Authoring), or
using Java applets (Software), or
finding Java resources (Location), or
how it might be used to
enhance the user experience
(Multimedia), etc.
These are
in each case (i.e. in each topic) a different 'facet' of Java, such as
how to write it, or how to use it, or what it can do. While these
aspects are necessaily overlapping to some degree, the separation into
distinct areas seems to me to be a useful one.
Naturally you could try to invert this and establish
'Java' as a top level category,
and have a single top-level category for Shockwave, and CGI, etc etc,
and sort them out at a lower level. But then you'd get
a proliferation of top-level categories as new technologies came along.
My current feeling is that the main problem is user education.
Before they dive in randomly looking for Java applets, say, they need to
analyse just what their problem is (e.g. to find a software
application). As software developers know, you should state the problem
before the solution. It might not even be that Java is the best way to
go; looking under 'Software' they might discover that JavaScript meets
their needs better.
The present scheme provides an extra
layer of abstraction that helps to group related issues (e.g. a problem
might equally well be solved by using CGI or JavaScript instead of or as
well as Java..), which is where the web designer should really start -
i.e. not with an implementation but a requirement.
I believe the major problem with current 'search engines' is that they
don't allow any classification of keywords, and many if not most words
have multiple meanings, depending on context. The result is that search
results are often too imprecise and overburden the user with superfluous
results. With the web still growing at a tremendous rate I suspect that
search engines are going to become less useful (unless they evolve
dramatically) and well-organised directories and encyclopedias will
become the preferred means of resource location for many.
This might all seem a bit academic but I firmly believe that solid
foundations will pay off in the long run. The web is now popularly
viewed as a chaotic mess in which it's terribly difficult to find the
most usefull stuff - certainly I find it so! I don't claim that
hyper-organization will totally solve these problems, but my experience
has been that our users appreciate the structure.
in WebWeek.
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