They come in all shapes and modes: flow charts, quasi-geographical maps, 3-d simulator-like terrains and many others. The "web Stalker" is an experimental web browser which is equipped with mapping functions. The range of applicability is mind boggling.

A (very) partial list:

The Internet Genome Project - "open-source map of major conceptual components of Internet and how they relate to each other"

Anatomy of a Linux System - Aimed to "...give viewers a concise and comprehensive look at Linux universe' and at heart of poster is a gravity well graphic showing core software components,surrounded by explanatory text"

NewMedia 500 - The financial, strategic, and other inter-relationshipsand interactions between leading 500 new (web) media firms

Internet Industry Map - Ownership and alliances determine status, control, and access in Internet industry. A revealing organizational chart.

The Internet Weather Report measures Internet performance, latency periods and downtime based on a sample of 4000 domains.

Real Time Geographic Visualization of WWW Traffic - a stunning, 3-d representation of web usage and traffic statistics world over.

WebBrain and Map.net provide a graphic rendition of Open Directory Project. The thematic structure of ODP is instantly discernible.

The WebMap is a visual, multi-category directory which contains 2,000,000 web sites. The user can zoom in and out of sub-categories and "unlock" their contents.

Maps help write fiction, trace a user's clickpath (replete with clickable web sites), capture Usenet and chat interactions (threads), plot search results (though Alta Vista discontinued its mapping service and Yahoo!3D is no more), bookmark web destinations, and navigate through complex sites.

Different metaphors are used as interface. Web sites are represented as plots of land, stars (whose brightness corresponds to web site's popularity ranking), amino-acids in DNA-like constellations,topographical maps of ocean depths, buildings in an urban landscape, or other objects in a pastoral setting. Virtual Reality (VR) maps allow information to be simultaneously browsed by teams of collaborators, sometimes represented as avatars in a fully immersive environment. In many applications, user is expected to fly amongst data items in virtual landscapes. With advent of sophisticated GUI's (Graphic UserInterfaces) and VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) - these maps may well show us way to a more colourful and user-friendly future.

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com

LexiBot, in words of its inventors, is...

"...the first and only search technology capable of identifying, retrieving, qualifying, classifying and organizing "deep" and "surface" content from World Wide Web. The LexiBot allows searchers to dive deep and explore hidden data from multiple sources simultaneously using directed queries. Businesses, researchers and consumers now have access to most valuable and hard-to-find information on Web and can retrieve it with pinpoint accuracy."

It places dozens of queries, in dozens of threads simultaneously and spiders results (rather as a "first generation" search engine would do). This could prove very useful with massive databases such as human genome, weather patterns, simulations of nuclear explosions, thematic, multi-featured databases, intelligent agents (e.g., shopping bots) and third generation search engines. It could also have implications on wireless internet (for instance, in analysing and generating location-specific advertising) and on e-commerce (which amounts to dynamic serving of web documents).

This transition from static to dynamic, from given to generated, from one-dimensionally linked to multi-dimensionally hyperlinked, from deterministic content to contingent, heuristically-created and uncertain content - is real revolution and future of web. Search engines have lost their efficacy as gateways. Portals have taken over but most people now use internal links (within same web site) to get from one place to another. This is where deep web comes in. Databases are about internal links. Hitherto they existed in splendid isolation, universes closed but to most persistent and knowledgeable. This may be about to change. The flood of quality relevant information this will unleash will dramatically dwarf anything that preceded it.

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com