Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Visualization Tools for Portal Organization

Structural organization techniques like taxonomies, facets, and metadata can aid information retrieval, but even with well-designed search queries that target particular subsets of content, a user can still be overwhelmed with the number of items returned by conventional search engines. Visualization tools effectively reduce information overload by mapping content to visual representations that aggregate content while highlighting significant relationships. For example, visualization tools can rapidly show a high-level structure, such as a site map, while allowing users to easily navigate to a particular area for more detail. In addition, these schemes depict content areas that users may not know exist ...