20.4 Possible Extensions

As has been shown in the last five chapters, the CYBERMAP approach is unique in the sense that it combines automatic link generation, dynamic linking and automatic construction of overview maps. The overview maps can then be used as navigation instrument in hyper (and non-hyper) space, and are also effective in filtering out information. In this section we sketch possible extensions and improvements of the CYBERMAP concept and implementation.

CYBERMAP so far makes only limited use of the link structure in that the web version uses <A HREF>-tagged links as preferred keywords. The direct inclusion of the actual document link structure into CYBERMAP would introduce a whole set of new and interesting problems as, e.g., how to extract this information, how to integrate the link information with the contents analysis, etc..

Another extension is to use CYBERMAP for multimedia data. We plan to expand the timbral CYBERMAP to improve clustering of audio data.. Also, we intend to investigate combining VideoScheme, which is described in part III, with CYBERMAP to be able to flexibly analyze audio and video on the fly for clustering.

A further component of CYBERMAP that can be improved is the graphical layout of the hyperdrawers. This means that other algorithms for the arrangement of the nodes need to be explored.

A last point which is definitively improvable is the user model. It can be further refined by adding the ability to analyze the reading behavior of the user. CYBERMAP would then be able to include additional nodes that have not been specified directly in the interest list, but might be of interest to the reader.

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~gloor

We are currently working on improving the dynamic clustering part in Java to allow for the user-specified addition of nodes to an already existing CYBERMAP on the fly. The CYBERMAP web version described here will be made available on the web for non-commercial public-domain use.