Visualization to Support Augmented Web Browsing

Abstract—In conventional Web browsing, to explore contents of interest while browsing a webpage, in many cases users need to leave that webpage and switch to external applications or other task-specific websites. To avoid switching between webpages, we present in this paper an approach to support the handling of further data and tasks added onto any browsed webpage in terms of augmented Web browsing. Without changing the existing Web contents and page-layouts, two levels of visual supports addable onto any existing webpage are suggested: (1) at micro level, visual cues encoding additional information are directly bound to particular hypermedia items, and (2) at macro level, additional visual layers are flexibly attached onto the browsed webpage. To illustrate the ideas, the Firefox add-on VizMe is developed with examples mimicking Google as a browser’s extension, and to browse Web snippets with geospatial and temporal references.