Abstract: Tracking customers is easier in cyberspace than in the brick-and-mortar world. Unfortunately, customer traffic through a website cannot be readily observed. In the systems, methods and data visualization metaphors of this invention, one or more instrumentation techniques are used to capture website activity data in real-time. This website activity data is provided to an aggregation subsystem that stores hits matching monitored web pages into one or more contexts. Each context is implemented as one or more independent data structures that contain configuration information and that are usable to capture and store hit data for web pages that are relevant to the monitoring task. The stored hit data is visualized using any one of a number of different visual metaphors, such as a “floor-and-back wall” visualization metaphor.

Abstract: A navigation system and method for viewing a data landscape in an information visualization system employs constraints and positions for the rendering viewpoint which are defined relative to a bounding box enclosing objects within a volume of interest. The bounding box is resized to reflect changes in objects within the volume of interest including the addition or deletion of objects and/or the resizing of objects. The bounding box is also correspondingly repositioned whenever the volume of interest is repositioned. Constraints and/or positions defined relative to the bounding box are updated accordingly and are employed to control the movement and re-orientation of the rendering viewpoint within the volume of interest by the user.