[Sigia-l] Site map generator?

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* listera at rcn.com
| 
| What is a "site structure"?

That's a very good question. :-)
 
| Because discovering links and parsing out relationships among them
| and finally clustering such relationships at various levels of
| granularity to unearth interaction flows is something tools can do
| better than humans.

This assumes that site structure= a site graph where pages are the
nodes and links are the edges. That's definitely a structure that is
on the site, but I doubt it's what most people have in mind when they
say "site structure".

I think what people usually mean by "site structure" is some kind of
"logical structure", a structure that reflects the semantics of the
information on the site in a way that makes sense to humans.

Probably we all agree that automated tools can produce the former, but
will have a very hard time producing the latter. Yes, you can do
clustering and so on, but you need to be very lucky for that to
produce something close to a structure that would satisfy a human.
And even so the clusters would have to be nameless, which makes them
much less useful.

Personally, I think that when people develop taxonomies for their
sites, that's an attempt to capture the site structure. And I would
argue that when they base their site on topic maps they actually do
get a formal structure that really is the site structure in the second
sense. The interesting thing is that in this case the page graph would
actually correspond relatively closely to the site structure.

When I started this email I didn't have the last paragraph in mind,
but somehow it came to me. Well, it's an interesting idea, anyway.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >