Chapter 9: Beyond Clicks and Semantics: Facilitating Navigation via the Web’s Social Capital

The World Wide Web has become a massive information abyss. The burden of navigating through the morass of online content has become extremely challenging to individual users. Prior research modeling navigation has examined both the behavioral components of navigational movements and the cognitive process involved in making meaning. While these perspectives have provided critical foundational knowledge of what it means to navigate and how navigation can be scaffolded within particular websites, they have failed to address the problem of supporting individual users as they traverse diverse areas of the web in order to complete a particular task. This chapter discusses a third dimension of navigation that must be taken into account when designing environments to alleviate issues related to information overload. The notion of leveraging the social nature of the web is described, along with various approaches and illustrative examples.