Creating Local Geographies for Map-Based Cyber Navigation

Although Internet and WWW phenomena are often described using spatial metaphors, the commonest means of geographic orientation - the map - is little used in online navigation. Maps of the physical world are however available online, as are maps illustrating physical Internet topography, semantic maps showing content linkages and maps of gaming environments, usually realistic simulations. Lacking an underlying geography, maps of entire virtual spaces such as cooperative knowledge spaces seem impossible or impractical as long as their sites are conceived only as unstructured or at most hierarchical) addresses. The ViCToR project (Virtual Cooperation in Teaching and Research) at the Technische Universitat Berlin uses a room metaphor to implement a shared, user-defined space for carrying out cooperative work in education and research. So far navigation in the hierarchically structured rooms is poorly developed. This paper explores the possibilities for implementing map-based domain navigation using a community-created local geography based on coordinates.