Visualization of Adlets and Sites

Adlets move from sites to sites to seek out new adlets or active documents, announce its own presence and collect information. In its movement adlets behave like magnets. An adlet or a collection of adlets can attract other adlets and pull them together. Conversely an adlet or a collection of adlets can repulse other adlets and push them apart. A collection of adlets is called a virtual site or simply a site. A virtual graph is the set of links and conceptual relations that characterize a (virtual) site.

For real sites, the sites' locations are their geographical locations. For virtual sites, the sites' locations are not geographical locations, but their logical locations in some virtual space. The distance between two virtual sites is proportional to the force of mutual attraction. One virtual site may span several real sites, and one real site may contain multiple virtual sites.



Figure 3. Visualization of adlets and sites.