CYBERSPACE GEOGRAPHY VISUALIZATION

CYBERSPACE GEOGRAPHY VISUALIZATION


ABSTRACT

The central goal of this paper is to give information about virtual locations to the actors of cyberspace in order to help them solve orientation issues, i.e. the lost-in-cyberspace syndrome. The approach taken involves low dimensional digital media to create the visualization that can guide you.

The World-Wide Web can be depicted as a graph. Each resource is a vertex and the links are the edges. The distances between pairs of resources is then defined as the shortest path in the graph between them, leading to the creation of a metric. With the ability provided to measure the distances among resources, it becomes possible to represent each resource as a point in a high dimensional space where their relative distances are preserved.
It is clear that a high dimensional space cannot be visualized and thus its dimensionality has to be reduced. To perform this task, the self-organizing maps algorithm is used because it preserves the topological relationships of the original space, conjointly lowering the dimensionality. This creates the ability to map any resources onto a lower dimensional space, while maintaining their order of proximity.

During this non-linear dimensionality reduction, the distances among resources are lost. Since it is primordial that the distances can be evaluated, the unified matrix method is used. By geometrically approximating the vector distribution in the neurons of the self-organizing maps, this method provides a means to analyse the landscape of the mapping of cyberspace.
To permit exploratory analysis of the self-organizing map, the mapping is made onto a two-dimensional visualization media. Note, however, that reduction is also possible, using the proposed method, to a space having an arbitrary dimension. This approach enables the visual display of virtual locations of resources on a landscape, in a fashion similar to geographical maps.