Real-Time Geographic Visualization of World Wide Web Traffic

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is well documented, with WWW sites now advertised in magazines, newspapers, and television commercials. Given current use of the WWW for scientific and educational information sharing and its emerging use for electronic commerce, studying access patterns is an important first step in understanding network implications and in designing future generations of WWW servers that can accommodate new media types and interaction modes. Due in large part to early development of the Mosaic WWW browser by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the access load on the NCSA WWW server remains extremely high. Using the NCSA WWW server as a high load testbed, we describe Avatar, a virtual reality system for real-time analysis and mapping of WWW server accesses to their point of geographic origin on various projections of the Earth. As HTTP protocols expand to demographic data, the Avatar architecture can be extended to correlate this data as well.