Enhanced Visualisation of Web Links and Annotations

Student Name
David Swalus
Thesis Type
Master Thesis
Thesis Status
Finished
Academic Year
2013 - 2014
Degree
Master in Applied Science and Engineering: Computer Science
Promoter
Beat Signer
Supervisor(s)
Ahmed A. O. Tayeh
Download
ThesisDavidSwalus_0.pdf
Description
Since 1989 the World Wide Web has evolved a lot. While in the beginning only web creators provided content for the Web, nowadays the Web has shifted towards a Web 2.0 where everyone can participate. A lot of people want to share their opinion about some facts. Therefore they use social media like Facebook and Twitter, or forums to post their impressions. Because there is no general way to save the comments, the Web becomes fragmented. Annotation software tries to solve the problem by providing users the possibility to add annotations to webpages and fragments. The problem with the software is that a popular webpage or paragraph can be overwhelmed with annotations and they do not provide a nice way to visualise a large amounts of annotations on a single page or fragment. In this thesis we want to come up with new ideas to solve these problems.
 
In this thesis we also want to find another way to use the Web. We will make some adjustments and propositions for HTML to provide other ways to link documents on the Web. To solve most of the problems, we plan to come up with another way of browsing the Web, which we call Wysinwis-browsing. Wysinwis-browsing stands for "What You see is not what I see"-browsing. The main concept is that a webpage will be differently rendered for the different users by using their profile. In that way, the annotations will be filtered in a way that only the most interesting links and annotations appear for a given user. To cover most of the ideas, we will create an application, the Wysinwis-browser, that will tackle the  technical details of the solutions. To assess every idea, the Wysinwis-browserwill be evaluated by means of a user study.