Over my last family vacation I was fortunate enough to see my brother who is getting his PhD in Artificial Intelligence down in Austin at U Texas.  We had spoken previously about setting up a website with some experimental navigation.  So over a handful of hours  collaborating we finally created his personal site for school.

The site navigation is displayed dynamically and is controlled by 1 text file.   I will include a snippet of his site description so you get a better idea of how this site actually functions.

This site employs an experimental content management system, conceived by me and generously implemented by Connected Web Solutions according to my somewhat unconventional specifications. Although I have yet to add much of the content, I wanted to put up a few words about navigating the site right off the bat.

The general idea behind this site is to model it on a Semantic Network. Each page in the site represents a ‘thing’ or ‘concept’ and the links between pages describe ‘relations’ between them. The pages in this site, like nodes in a semantic net, are not restricted to the kind of tree structure often used in a website. Instead they are best thought of as a directed graph with pages corresponding to vertices and links corresponding to edges. The current page’s outgoing relations are displayed as lists on the right hand side of the screen. Pages which have outgoing relations to the current page are displayed as list headings on the left hand side of the screen with the corresponding relation name as a sub-heading (although sometimes this is omitted). Below the relation name is a list of other pages that also stand in that relation to the heading. The idea of all these lists is to provide the current page with context and relevant navigation.

Julian, University of Texas in Austin

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.