VISUALIZING ONLINE ACTIVITY.

This article focuses on information visualization for the purpose of displaying web site structure, navigation, paths, flows and activity on the Internet. Information visualization is a research area in computer science that focuses on creating rich visual interfaces to help users understand and navigate through complex information spaces. According to the author, often business managers and web site designers are overwhelmed by the huge volume of data to be presented on the web and conventional analysis tools like spreadsheets and reports, often fall short of the requirements. Data sets are frequently large and time-varying and usually involve multi-dimensional structures. Unlike scientific visualization, where the research focus is creating 3D representations of physical phenomena, the fundamental problem for developers of information visualizations is that, because the data is non-spatial, it lacks natural physical representation. Thus, information visualization, the author maintains, is mainly about inventing new visual metaphors for presenting information and developing ways to manipulate these metaphors to make sense of the information.