Intelligent Web Information Mapping with HyperMap

This paper addresses some particular issues related to the difficult task of automatic mapping of Web information to help the user to find interesting and unexpected information on the Web. The approach puts together qualitative and quantitative reasoning. The qualitative reasoning is done through a spatial mereotopological calculus since we metaphorically see Web sites as space regions. As a result, documents/sites are grouped together into classes according to the spatial relation they satisfy. Quantitative reasoning is done through information retrieval techniques allowing users to choose a document based on a similarity measure between documents/sites. Experiments have been undertaken in two directions: to find an intuitive model to display the Web map through the development of a system called HyperMap and to discover interesting and unexpected information from the spatial Web map's metaphor.