Adaptive Treemap Based Navigation Through Web Portals

Abstract

Today, Portals most often present the navigation in form of tree-like structures to users. These trees follow a representation of data with a natural hierarchy. Single nodes are either parents or children. This representation style has several drawbacks: for reaching the leaves users have to traverse rather long paths. During the traversion of the tree users get often lost and, finally, the content relations remain unclear. It is not obvious where the ”most” content is located, too. We regard treemapping (a method for displaying tree-structured data using nested polygons) as a promising technology to overcome these draw- backs. We especially focus on adaptive treemaps displaying different treemaps to different users - always trying to satisfy each single users’ individual needs. Our main concepts have been prototypically embedded within IBM’s WebSphere Portal.