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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010HOTLINK VISUALIZER: ADDING HOTLINKS ON THESPOT – VISUALIZING THE OUTCOMEGregory Triantafillidis and John GarofalakisUniversity of Patras, Computer Engineering and Informatics Department26500, Patras, GreeceABSTRACTHotlink assignment is a constantly growing field of research addressing the problem of low information access rates inthe World Wide Web. In this paper we attempt a more practical approach to the problem, by proposing an administrativetool, the ‘HotLink Visualizer’, which implements hotlink additions to stored instances of the web site in question, in auser friendly way. Our tool obtains and stores all the necessary information concerning the web site’s connectivity usinga modified and specially configured web crawler. The outcome is a series of stored web site instances, produced byapplying different sets of hotlinks (generated by specific hotlink assignment algorithms) to the initially stored instance,which can be edited and visualized by the user. ‘HotLink Visualizer’ aims to bridge the gap between the severaltheoretical hotlink assignment methods proposed by researchers and the need to put their results into use.KEYWORDSHotlinks Assignment, Software Tools, Algorithms.1. INTRODUCTIONThe World Wide Web has become established as the most popular source of information retrieval. Asexpected, the older it gets the more information it contains and thus the number of the web sites with giganticgrowth and bad information access rates are constantly increased within it. The efforts to optimize theseaccess rates are continuous and towards those, several fields of research have developed, such as theimprovement of web design, clustering and caching. Obviously, although a web site is only a cell of theWorld Wide Web, a well designed and organized site contributes to the improvement of the informationaccess rates in the web. Good structure for a web site means less traffic on the Internet, as the user gets thepiece of information required without wandering unnecessarily in it. Furthermore, a properly organized siteconstitutes a more appealing choice for the users.During the last years the matter is being addressed with the development of several hotlink assignmentalgorithms for web sites. The idea behind those algorithms is to spot the most popular or more likely to beaccessed data and provide better access to it by assigning additional links (hotlinks) pointing to the webpages containing it. These algorithms are not applied to the actual representations of these web sites butusually to their corresponding direct acyclic graphs (DAGs) or to other even more strict structures. However,it is widely known that a web site in its true form is not a DAG, since there can be found many links pointingto just one page, thus forming circles and repeated nodes within the graph. Hence, there is a gap between thetheoretical determination of a set of hotlinks and the actual application of this set to a real web site.In this paper we first address the issue of acquiring and storing the exact map of a web site with its fullconnectivity, which can be considered as a first step towards the assignment of hotlinks in real web sites. By‘storing’ we mean keeping an offline, viewable and -for our purposes- editable instance of the web site’smap. To do so, we first clarify theoretically what a web site’s map with the complete connectivityinformation should be and we determine the subsequent prerequisites that our crawler must have. We thenproceed with the appropriate specification and modification of an existing web crawler, with functionalitysuited to our specific needs. Finally we propose an administrative tool, the ‘Hotlink Visualizer’, which, afterstoring in tabular data all the necessary information to capture a web site’s real map, it visualizes the outcomeand implements hotlink additions by adding with an automated procedure the generated hotlinks in the web73