Application of concept mapping on Web browsing

An interface with the concept mapping technique was implemented to research whether such an interface has advantages for web browsing over the common interface used by Internet Explorer. The functions implemented in the interface included tree-spread, tree-collapse, target searching/highlighting, and so on. Comparison testing was designed and performed to measure the performance of the user using both interfaces to find information in a web site. Results show that concept mapping interface has an advantage over Internet Explorer during early testing, while Internet Explorer has better performance during later testing, indicating that the concept mapping technique is a useful tool for learning new information/knowledge. On the other hand, because real web sites usually have tens or hundreds of sub-links, and the relationship between the URL string and the real content of the page is often very limited, the application of this technique on web browsing is probably not practical.