[Sigia-l] Site map generator?

[Listera]

Lyle Kantrovich:

> Sometimes logical theories don't work out in the real world...or the
> online world in this case.  :-)

Then I invite you to reread the actual words:

>> 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. We
>> have had over a decade of such tools and not just for websites, but all for
>> sorts of info visualization, data mining, gene sequencing, statistics, log
>> analysis, etc.

The paragraph you isolated refers to what the tools we've had for at least a
decade *do*. Are you disputing that we have tools that do the things I
cited?

That's not to say that they should be used to generate site maps and
"structures" of the kind Donna was talking about, which she further
explained offline, because I asked (something you chose to ignore).

> I've tried many a "site mapper" in my day, and found a few that could
> work for very small sites...but nothing that scaled well.

Regressive relationship discovery apps in various forms have been around
probably longer than two decades. Having built one 11 years ago as part of a
tagging engine, I can tell you that such software can scale deeper and wider
than any human can by an order of magnitude.

> 1. Directory and file structure doesn't always map to the semantic or
> content structure

So? Use other criteria. A site *discovery* tool doesn't just have to map
file directories.
 
> If anyone thinks this kind of tool would be easy to build, I'd suggest
> they give it a try.

Personally, I don't think much of sitemaps and can't remember the last time
I used one. I deal with complex, dynamically-generated *applications* as
opposed to documents/pages/websites. I try to eliminate pages and navigation
as much as possible, usually get rid of them completely. I don't like the
user to navigate to the information, I design apps to bring the info to the
user when needed in context. So existing site structures I'm charged to
redesign often mean very little to me.

As you say, there are issues with *existing* site mapping tools. But that
doesn't mean that we can't extract structural or semantic insights using an
algorithmic approach. Entity extraction, auto-taxonomy and various other
classification tools we already have do pretty amazing things. The fact that
they are not used for site mapping as they cost $250,000 and up is
orthogonal to the argument.

Let software do the mapping, let humans to do the interpreting and
designing.

----
Ziya

"Innovate as a last resort."