Visualization to Support Augmented Web Browsing

In conventional Web browsing, to explore contents of interest while browsing a Web page, in many cases users need to leave that Web page and switch to external applications or other task-specific Web sites. To avoid switching between Web pages, we present in this paper an approach to support the handling of data and tasks further added onto the browsed Web pages in terms of augmented Web browsing. Without changing the existing Web contents and page-layouts, two levels of visual supports addable onto any existing Web page 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 Web pages. To illustrate the ideas, the Fire fox add-on VizMe is developed with examples mimicking Google as a browser's extension, and to browse Web snippets with geospatial and temporal references.