Modeling Semantic and Structural Knowledge in Web Navigation
Ion Juvina, Herre van Oostendorp · Discourse Processes · 2008
Research on cognitive modeling of information search and Web navigation emphasizes the importance of “information scent” (the relevance of semantic cues such as link labels and headings to a reader's goal; Pirolli & Card, 1999 Pirolli, P. and Card, S. K. 1999. Information foraging.. Psychological Review, 106: 643–675. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). This article shows that not only semantic but also structural knowledge is involved in navigating the Web (Juvina, 2006 Juvina, I. 2006. Development of a cognitive model for navigating on the Web, The Netherlands: Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University. [Google Scholar]). This article argues for considering both semantic and structural knowledge in modelling Web navigation. A cognitive model is proposed that uses information scent to account for user's judgments of relevance (a semantic dimension) and “path adequacy” (the semantic similarity between a navigation path and a user's goal) to account for user's efficiency in traversing a Web structure (a structural dimension). Two empirical studies show that abilities to represent and manipulate spatial structures are complementary to semantic abilities in accounting for Web navigation performance.