Using semantic treemaps to categorize and visualize bookmark files

As more and more information is available on the Internet, search engines and bookmark tools become very popular. However, most search tools are based on character-level matching without any semantic analysis, and users have to manually organize their bookmarks or favorite collections without any convenient tool to help them identify the subjects of the Web pages. In this paper, we introduce an interactive tool that automatically analyzes, categorizes, and visualizes the semantic relationships of web pages in personal bookmark or favorites collections based on their semantic similarity. Sophisticated data analysis methods are applied to retrieve and analyze the full text of the Web pages. The Web pages are clustered hierarchically based on their semantic similarit ies. A utility measure is recursively applied to determine the best partitions that are visualized by what we call the Semantic Treemap. Various interaction methods such as scrolling, zooming, expanding, selecting, searching, filtering etc. are provided to facilitate viewing and querying for information. Furthermore, the hierarchical organization as well as the semantic similarit ies among Web pages can be exported and visualized in a collaborative 3D environment, allowing a group of people to compare and share each other’s bookmarks.