IDIA 614 Sequential Visualization And Analysis

Assignment 3 Essay - Information Map

David Pepper

This site map shows the web properties of Johns Hopkins University Scool of Professional Studies in Business and Education (SPSBE). SPSBE is the entity which houses JHU's programs and projects which do not [yet] fit into another school. Several successful JHU entities which are now schools unto themselves started in SPSBE (or one of it's predecessors), for example the School of Nursing. However, SPSPBE also houses several entities which seem unlikely to convert to independence, for example the Evergreen and Odyssey programs.

This unusual mission has given an unusual task to SPSBE's Information Technology Services and Support (ITSS) department, that of administrating the combined web sites from a central, shared development environment, while maintaining each of them as separately branded web sites with divergent audiences and constituencies.

These sites and domains are:

Two other discrete SPSBE web properties have no navigational link from/to the SPSBE main page, or from the "One Stop":

My strategy for the site map was to map the navigational paths of the six SPSBE sites which share a common brand. Beyond identifying at a high level the owning entity, I wanted to impose a classification which categorized the content area of the page as home, primary, secondary, or linked from common navigation.

I wanted to show the pages of the site with a brief human-readable label and to also include an index for the top-level pages in each section, along with their actual URLs. The idea was that this deliverable would be for an internal customer, and would be designed as an analytical tool for understanding the structure of the web sites, rather than for an external customer for whom the exact "marketing" names would presumably be more important.

SPSBE makes great use of includes and style-sheet driven design, so there is a lot of reuse of page elements from one page to another. SPSBE also has a number of features of the website which are dynamically generated, and which present localized supsets of data through a common interface, often publishing it through a highly rationalized url, for example several of the eight properties publish their course schedule at a url constructed by the base url + "courseschedule".

This resuse strategy comes at the cost of a very obtuse, overwhelmingly interrelated website, with many recursive navigational options. After working in IT there for four years (one of them as a web programmer) I still find new parts of the site, and I believe that no one person has, nor ever will, see every SPSBE page.

To gather the data which fed into the diagramming project I used a combination of my own research through navigation, and a couple of offline browser tools (Teleport Ultra and Viseo 2003). But after considerable experimentation I ended up putting aside the artifacts created by these two programs and decided to draw the diagram by hand. This strategy all-but-guaranteed that I would miss something, but it also allowed me to focus on the parts of the sites that I see as important, and it meant that more of my time could be spent building the deliverable, rather than struggling with automatically created output.

At the upper-left of the diagram I put the SPSBE landing page, and below it, the consolidated service center known as the "JHU One Stop" where SPSBE has attempted to put common resources in a single collectively branded location.

To the right of the SPSBE home page and the One Stop are the main JHU entities which SPSBE links to (The Carey Business School, The School of Education, Evergreen, Odyssey, and the JHU Main page). The flow suggested by the arrows is quite literal. By design, no part of the sites point back to SPSBE.JHU.EDU, and each mini-site operates as an island, only betraying their interrelationships by the commonly linked "One Stop" destination.