REAL-TIME GEOGRAPHIC VISUALIZATION OF WORLD-WIDE-WEB TRAFFIC

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is well documented, with WWW sites now advertised in magazines, newspapers, and television comm ercials. Given current use of the WWW for scientific and educational i nformation sharing and its emerging use for electronic commerce, study ing access patterns is an important first step in understanding networ k implications and in designing future generations of WWW servers that can accommodate new media types and interaction modes. Due in large p art to early development of the Mosaic WWW browser by the National Cen ter for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the access load on the NCS A WWW server remains extremely high. Using the NCSA WWW server as a hi gh load testbed, we describe Avatar, a virtual reality system for real -time analysis and mapping of WWW server accesses to their point of ge ographic origin on various projections of the Earth. As HTTP protocols expand to demographic data, the Avatar architecture can be extended t o correlate this data as well.