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New Cartographies to ChartOver the last decade or so there has been a phenomenal growth in the use and diver-

sity of information and communications technologies and the conceptual ‘space’ they

support: cyberspace. Understanding the growth of cyberspace, and its myriad of

social, economic, and political consequences, as well as the practical tasks of navigat-

ing and comprehending the various types or domains of cyberspace (such as the Web,

email, real-time chat and instant messaging, file sharing, or 3D virtual worlds) is no

easy task. Concepts and techniques from geoinformatics can be usefully employed to

promote our understanding and to aid analysis of cyberspace. In particular, maps and

map-like interfaces are increasingly becoming useful in representing, and in some

senses actually creating, cyberspace. Mapping is thus being recognised as a powerful

tool in the visualization and analysis of cyberspace. Therefore in this article the

authors of Atlas of Cyberspace discuss how the Internet is being mapped.

By Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin

Geoinformatics - Making Sense of Cyberspace Form

Paradoxically, more and more of our timeand our leisure and business activities arespent in virtual space and yet it is a spacethat is difficult to comprehend and mentallyvisualise. Moreover, it is a space in which itis easy to get lost and confused. This isbecause, with the exception of the support-ing infrastructure – fibre-optic cables,servers, satellites and so on – cyberspace iscomposed of computer code with no materi-al existence. As a consequence, many of theprojects that seek to map cyberspace areusing processes of spatialisation in order tomake sense of its form and the transactionsthat take place there. Of particular signifi-cance to the geoinformatics community isthat these projects are developing new map-ping techniques that are pushing back theboundaries of cartography and how weinteract with maps, creating new kinds ofinteractive and dynamic representations.

Mapping Network Infrastructure

Much of the effort to map cyberspace hashistorically focused on the measurementand representation of the supporting tech-

nology of telecommunications and comput-ing infrastructure. At a basic level, it is rela-tively easy to map the locations oftelecommunications infrastructure such ascables and computer servers onto real-world geography, at various scales, usingtypical GIS methodologies. Indeed much of

this infrastructure is planned, installed andmaintained using AM/FM, CAD databasesand cable management systems that arebased around spatial databases.This type of approach has many merits,providing the necessary geographic inven-tory and census of where the Internetnodes are located, how the data networksinterconnect them, and the traffic thatflows between them. Well-designed infras-tructure maps can clearly show how com-puters are physically wired together to cre-ate complex networks that link cities andcountries across the globe. It also revealsthe uneven geographic distribution of

infrastructure and those areas of the worldthat have poor access to cyberspace or arepresently excluded altogether. An exampleof such a map is shown in Figure 1. It is a3D, interactive map of the Internet MBonenetwork created by researchers TamaraMunzner, K. Claffy, Eric Hoffman and BillFenner. The MBone comprises a special setof routes, known as ‘tunnels’ in technicaljargon, which run on top of the ordinaryInternet. Munzner and her colleagues mapthese tunnels as arcs on 3D model of theglobe, which the user can manipulate torotate and view from any angle. The linecolour and thickness are used to showcharacteristics of the MBone tunnels, whilethe height of the arcs above the surface ofthe globe is a function of distance betweenthe end MBone router nodes.

Geographic Maps of Internet Infrastructure

Geographic maps of Internet infrastructureare commonly employed by network own-ers for two particular tasks. First, they areuseful to network engineers as interfacetools in the monitoring and control of traf-fic flows and network performance.Second, they are used as promotional toolsto demonstrate to potential customers howextensive and capable their networks are.The cartographic techniques employed canvary substantially, including interactive 3Dglobe representations and dynamic mapsthat update in real-time.

Network Weather Maps

The detailed network monitoring maps andtools are generally not made public for rea-sons of security and commercial confiden-tiality. However, some Internet networks,particularly those serving the research andeducation communities, do provide summa-ry performance data using map interfaces.These interfaces are popularly referred toas network weather maps. They are insome senses useful marketing as well aspublic-spirited information disseminationtools, providing network customers (usuallyuniversities and labs) with useful informa-tion, especially to identify trouble spots.Below are two interesting examples of net-work weather maps – the Abilene networkin the US (Figure 2) and NORDUnet serving

New Cartographies to Chart

Cyberspace is difficult to

comprehend and mentally

visualise.

APRIL/MAY 2002Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com

Scandinavia (Figure 3). The maps areupdated frequently (for example theAbilene map is updated every five minutes)and allow outside users a ‘peak inside’ thenetwork. The map is simply a summary ofoverall network performance with linkscolour coded by their traffic flows, but italso provides a visual interface to browsemore detailed statistics available as tablesand statistical charts. The NORDUnet exam-ple is also interesting because it uses alogical network diagram instead of a geo-graphic link-node map to represent theinfrastructure. There are many othercyberspace mapping efforts that also dis-pense with the framework of real-worldgeography. For example, researcherStephen Coast at the Centre for AdvancedSpatial Analysis has been undertakinglarge-scale measurement and mapping ofthe topology of IP routing. His mappingtechnique currently uses abstract graphs -for example, Figure 4 shows the topologyof the large campus IP network ofUniversity College, London. Each cluster inthe map is an individual university buildingor large department and the distance met-ric is based on speed of network links. Sothe long grey lines are generally networklinks between buildings. In total, some4,600 nodes of the network are shown.

The Internet Is Its Own Space

Another example, at a larger scale is theInternet Mapping Project <http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~ches/map/index.html> beingundertaken by Bill Cheswick and Hal

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simple rules, with forces of attraction andrepulsion jostling the nodes into a stable,legible configuration. There are many per-mutations in the algorithm to generate dif-ferent layouts and colour-codings of thelinks according to different criteria (such asnetwork ownership, country). In the exam-ple shown, links have been colour-codedaccording to the ISP, seeking to highlightwho 'owns' the largest sections of Internettopology. This project is ongoing and thedata is archived and available to otherresearchers to utilise. Over time, it ishoped that the data will be useful formonitoring growth and changes in thestructure of the Internet. Also, the experi-ence gained in mapping the Internet isbeing applied commercially by Cheswichand Burch at Lumeta where they use thenetwork scanning and visualization tech-niques to chart the structure of corporateintranets to identify security weaknessesand unauthorized nodes.

Mapping Information

The Internet, and the Web in particular, is alarge and rapidly growing informationresource. Literally billions of pieces of infor-mation are stored on networked computersaround the globe and they can potentiallybe accessed in seconds. However, searchingand navigating this information can be diffi-cult, especially when it is composed of longlists of references. Finding useful and rele-vant information in a timely fashion can bevery frustrating, as most Web users will beonly be too aware. One experimental solu-tion has been to spatialise large informationcollections – that is, to summarize and char-

Burch, at Lumeta Corporation (formerly atBell Labs). Their project maps the topologyof thousands of interconnected Internetnetworks to provide perhaps the best cur-rently available large-scale overview of thecore of the Internet in a single snapshot.They map the Internet in an abstractspace, disregarding the actual location ofnodes in physical space. As Cheswickargues, ‘We don't try to lay out theInternet according to geography... TheInternet is its own space, independent ofgeography.’ Data is gathered by using theInternet to measure itself on a daily basis,surveying the routes to a large number ofend-points (usually Web servers) from theirbase in New Jersey, USA. The resultinghuge graph maps how the hundreds ofnetworks and many thousands of nodesconnect together to form the core of

Internet. The striking example (Figure 5)shows the structure of the Internet fromDecember 2000, representing nearly100,000 network nodes. This highly com-plex graph takes several hours to generateon a typical PC. The layout algorithm uses

Cyberspace

Figure 1: 3D arcs on a globe representation of theInternet MBone network.(Courtesy of Tamara Munzner and IEEE, www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/mbone/)

Figure 2: ‘Weather map’ of the traffic load on the core links of the Abilene network. (Courtesy of the AbileneNetwork Operations Center, Indiana University, http://hydra.uits.iu.edu/~abilene/traffic/)

Cyberspace

Many cyberspace mapping

efforts dispense with the

framework of real-world

geography.

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acterize the information using a map-likerepresentation where location, area, distanceand proximity in the display represent keyaspects of the data (e.g. the more relatedthe information, the closer together it isdrawn on the map). The result is an infor-mation map that summarizes thousands ofpieces of information on a single screen andwhich can be navigated like a conventionalmap. Information mapping exploits the factthat people generally find it easier to pro-cess and understand visual displays thanlarge volumes of written text or columns ofnumbers. This process is known as spatiali-sation and different algorithms can producea variety of map forms, ranging from simple

2D maps to immersive 3D fly-through data-landscapes, and in scale from individualwebsites up to large sections of the Web.Examples of such spatialisations includeMap.net, which maps a large directory ofwebsites and Map of the Market, whichshows the changing stock market.

Map.net

Shown in Figure 6 below is a small part ofMap.net <http:// www.map.net/>, a huge spa-tialisation of the Open Directory, a classifica-tion of over 2 million websites into morethan 350,000 categories. The map is a multi-

levelled hierarchy of categories that gets pro-gressively more detailed in scale as the hier-archy is traversed. Browsing the map isachieved by the standard point-and-click nav-igation approach of the Web. The categoriesof websites are represented by colour coded,irregular shaped polygons whose size is inproportion to the number of websites theyrepresent. Individual websites of particularsignificance in the category are highlighted bytarget symbols. The example below showsthe third level in the information hierarchy,displaying a map of websites about boardgames. There are a range of more detailedcategories for different types of board gamesavailable shown by the different sized andcoloured polygon, arranged in alphabeticalorder across the map extent.

Map of the Market

Another excellent example of the potentialpower and usefulness of spatialisation forinformation summary and navigation is theMap of the Market <http://www.smartmoney.com/map/>. Understanding the daily fluctua-tions in the stock market is a serious busi-ness for traders, analysts and investors andthe Map of the Market is able to show thechanging stock prices of over 500 publicly-traded companies on a single screen. Sinceits launch by SmartMoney.com at the end of1998, the Map of the Market has become afirm favourite with users. This is due, in largepart, to the fact that it presents large volumesof fast changing data in a very useful andusable format, providing people with answersto the basic question ‘how is the marketdoing today?’ at a single glance. It is probablythe most useful exemplar of information map-ping on the Web today. On one single mapusers can quickly gain a sense of the overallmarket conditions, yet still see many hun-dreds of individual data elements. It is fullyinteractive, allowing the user to access a greatdeal of information, statistics and news onthe companies by clicking on their tiles.

Compact and Elegant Spatialisation

Map of the Market is a compact and elegantspatialisation using a display of colouredrectangular tiles to show the changing perfor-mance of the most important companies onthe US stock market, updated every fifteenminutes. Figure 7 shows an example of Mapof the Market from the 16th of July 2001.Each tile represents a single company, withthe size of the tile being proportional to itsmarket capitalization. So, the larger the tile,

Figure 3: The ‘weather map’ of network load for the NORDUnet network. (Courtesy of NORDUnet, www.nordu.net)

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Figure 4: The topology of the UCL campus network by Steve Coast. (Courtesy of Stephen Coast, Centre for AdvancedSpatial Analysis, UCL, www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/steve/stuff/ipmap/)

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the greater is the value of the company. Thisallows the value of different companies to beassessed by simply comparing the size oftheir tiles. The colour of the tile encodes thechange in the company’s stock price over aset time period. In the default colour set-tings, red represents a declining stock price,while green shows positive growth. Blackindicates no change. The stronger the satura-tion of colour, the stronger is the percentagestock price change (either negative or posi-tive). The position of the tiles in the mapalso conveys useful information. Firstly, com-panies are arranged into eleven major sectorsand then further grouped by industry type.The particular spatial layout of tiles withinthe industry block tries to cluster companiesas close together as possible, based on his-torically similar stock price movements - theidea being to create neighbourhoods in themap which contain similarly-performing com-panies. So, on the Map of the Market youwill often see distinctive spatial patterns oflight and dark tiles that can reveal significantlarge-scale trends in stock prices.

Conclusion

In this article we have sought to provide abrief introduction to the ways in which aca-demic and commercial researchers are seek-ing to map and make sense of cyberspace.The maps they are creating are, we wouldargue, pushing back the barriers of carto-graphic technique and design and shouldtherefore be of interest to everyone inter-ested in geographic visualization.

Martin Dodge works as a computer technician and

researcher in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

(CASA), at University College London. He maintains the

Cyber-Geography Research web site at

<http://www.cybergeography.org>, which includes the

Atlas of Cyberspaces. With co-author Rob Kitchin, he has

also written the books Mapping Cyberspace (Routledge,

2000) and Atlas of Cyberspace (Addison-Wesley, 2001).

Rob Kitchin is a senior lecturer in human geography

at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He

is the author of Cyberspace (Wiley, 1998) and the co-

author of Mapping Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and

Atlas of Cyberspace (Addison-Wesley, 2001). He has

published three other books and is the general editor

of the journal Social and Cultural Geography.

Editors Note:

In depth and detail a wide range of such projects are

presented in the book "Atlas of Cyberspace", written

by the authors of this article Martin Dodge & Rob

Kitchin and published by Addison-Wesley in August

2001 (HB, 268 pages, ISBN: 0201745755). ■

Figure 6: The Map.net map of a small section of Open Directory showing board game websites. (Courtesy ofAntarcti.ca Systems Inc., www.map.net)

Figure 7: The Map of the Market. (Courtesy of SmartMoney.com, www.smartmoney.com/)

Figure 5: Map of the Internet topology by Hal Burch and Bill Cheswick. (Courtesy of Peacock Maps Inc., www.peacockmaps.com)