| Scripted Documents: A Hypermedia Path Mechanism | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1-14 | |
| Polle T. Zellweger | |||
| The concept of a path, or ordered traversal of some links in a hypertext, has been a part of the hypertext notion from its early formation. Although paths can help to solve two major problems with hypertext systems, namely user disorientation and high cognitive overhead for users, their value has not been recognized. Paths can also provide the backbone for computations over a hypertext, an important issue for the future of hypertext. This paper constructs a framework for understanding path mechanisms for hypertext and explores the basic issues surrounding them. Given this framework, it reviews path mechanisms that have been provided by other hypertext systems. Finally, it describes the Scripted Documents system, which has been developed to test the potential of one powerful path mechanism. | |||
| Guided Tours and On-Line Presentations: How Authors Make Existing Hypertext Intelligible for Readers | | BIBA | Full-Text | 15-26 | |
| Catherine C. Marshall; Peggy M. Irish | |||
| Hypertext systems like NoteCards provide facilities for authoring large networks. But they provide little support for the associated task of making these networks intelligible to future readers. Presentation conventions may be imported from other related media, but because the conventions have not yet been negotiated within a community of hypertext readers and writers, they provide only a partial solution to the problem of guiding a reader through an existing network of information. In this paper, we will discuss how a recent facility, Guided Tours, has been used to organize hypertext networks for presentation. The use of Guided Tours in NoteCards has exposed a set of authoring issues, and has provided us with examples of solutions to the problems associated with on-line presentations. | |||
| Programmable Browsing Semantics in Trellis | | BIB | Full-Text | 27-42 | |
| Richard Furuta; P. David Stotts | |||
| Hypermedia Topologies and User Navigation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 43-50 | |
| H. Van Dyke Parunak | |||
| One of the major problems confronting users of large hypermedia systems is that of navigation: knowing where one is, where one wants to go, and how to get there from here. This paper contributes to this problem in three steps. First, it articulates a number of navigational strategies that people use in physical (geographical) navigation. Second, it correlates these with various graph topologies, showing how and why appropriately restricting the connectivity of a hyperbase can improve the ability of users to navigate. Third, it analyzes some common hypermedia navigational mechanisms in terms of navigational strategies and graph topology. | |||
| Design Issues for Multi-Document Hypertexts | | BIB | Full-Text | 51-60 | |
| Robert J. Glushko | |||
| Asynchronous Design/Evaluation Methods for Hypertext Technology Development | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 61-81 | |
| Gary Perlman | |||
| A process model used in the design and evaluation of hypertext systems is
discussed. The model includes asynchronous processes of task analysis,
document analysis, literature survey and systems evaluation, interpretation of
data, designing and building systems, and collecting data. For each process,
experiences with NaviText SAM, a hypertext interface to a reference source, are
discussed. A variety of new methods for evaluation of experimental systems are
presented along with several empirical results. Keywords: Hypertext, Hypermedia, Systems development, Methods, User interfaces,
Documentation | |||
| Towards a Design Language for Representing Hypermedia Cues | | BIB | Full-Text | 83-92 | |
| Shelley Evenson; John Rheinfrank; Wendie Wulff | |||
| Facilitating the Development of Representations in Hypertext with IDE | | BIBA | Full-Text | 93-104 | |
| Daniel S. Jordan; Daniel M. Russell; Anne-Marie S. Jensen; Russell A. Rogers | |||
| Hypertext systems are used for a variety of representational tasks, many that involve fairly formalized structures. Because hypertext systems are generally intended for developing informal (unstructured data) and semi-formal (semantic networks) structures, developing more formal structures can be difficult. Regular patterns in structures must often be recreated from primitive elements (individual nodes and links) resulting in a high overhead cost. In this paper we describe the Instructional Design Environment, or IDE, a hypertext system application that facilitates the rapid and accurate creation of regular network patterns in hypertext. IDE focuses on the task of instructional design, but its facilities are general and useful to many representation tasks. IDE features structure accelerators that provide simple menu interfaces to (1) define network structures out of patterns of typed node and link connections, (2) create new node types that contain structured content, and (3) tailor the interface for creating cards, links and structures to focus attention during different stages of the representation task. These mechanisms allow the user to tailor the hypertext environment to better meet his or her representational needs. We also report on the field use of IDE by instructional designers. | |||
| JANUS: Integrating Hypertext with a Knowledge-Based Design Environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 105-117 | |
| Gerhard Fischer; Raymond McCall; Anders Morch | |||
| Hypertext systems and other complex information stores offer little or no
guidance in helping users find information useful for activities they are
currently engaged in. Most users are not interested in exploring hypertext
information spaces per se but rather in obtaining information to solve problems
or accomplish tasks. As a step towards this we have developed the JANUS design
environment. JANUS allows designers to construct artifacts in the domain of
architectural design and at the same time to be informed about principles of
design and the reasoning underlying them. This process integrates two design
activities: construction and argumentation. Construction is supported by a
knowledge-based graphical design environment and argumentation is supported by
a hypertext system. Our empirical evaluations of JANUS and its predecessors
has shown that integrated support for construction and argumentation is
necessary for full support of design. Keywords: Hypertext, Knowledge-based systems, Construction, Argumentation, Informed
design, Human problem-domain communication, Construction kits, Design
environments, Issue-based information system (IBIS), Procedural hierarchy of
issues (PHI) methodology | |||
| Towards an Integrated Maintenance Advisor | | BIB | Full-Text | 119-127 | |
| Phil Hayes; Jeff Pepper | |||
| Distributed Hypertext for Collaborative Research: The Virtual Notebook System | | BIB | Full-Text | 129-135 | |
| Frank M., III Shipman; R. Jesse Chaney; G. Anthony Gorry | |||
| Sun's Link Service: A Protocol for Open Linking | | BIBA | Full-Text | 137-146 | |
| Amy Pearl | |||
| Sun's Link Service, a product shipped with Sun's programming in the large software development environment, the Network Software Environment, allows users to make and maintain explicit and persistent bidirectional relationships between autonomous frontend applications. The Link Service defines a protocol for an extensible and loosely coupled, or open, hypertext system. An interesting instance of this is the ability to link to objects in closed hypertext systems if they integrate with the Link Service. The Link Service addresses link maintenance and automated versioning. Link endpoints, or nodes, are defined by the integrating applications, and are not restricted to points, whole documents, or cards. | |||
| A Visual Representation for Knowledge Structures | | BIBA | Full-Text | 147-158 | |
| Michael Travers | |||
| Knowledge-based systems often represent their knowledge as a network of
interrelated units. Such networks are commonly presented to the user as a
diagram of nodes connected by lines. These diagrams have provided a powerful
visual metaphor for knowledge representation. However, their complexity can
easily become unmanageable as the knowledge base (KB) grows.
This paper describes an alternate visual representation for navigating knowledge structures, based on a virtual museum metaphor. This representation uses nested boxes rather than linked nodes to represent relations. The intricate structure of the knowledge base is conveyed by a combination of position, size, color, and font cues. MUE (Museum Unit Editor) was implemented using this representation to provide a graphic front end for the Cyc knowledge base. | |||
| Using Hypertext in a Law Firm | | BIB | Full-Text | 159-167 | |
| Elise Yoder; Thomas C. Wettach | |||
| Hypertext Challenges in the Auditing Domain | | BIBA | Full-Text | 169-180 | |
| Laura DeYoung | |||
| Auditing is the process by which an opinion is formed on the financial
statements of a company by a group of outside professional accountants. Large
numbers of documents pertaining to the company's business are examined and many
more are produced during an audit in order to arrive at and provide a basis for
this opinion. These documents contain a wide variety of interrelated
information. Capturing these interrelationships is essential to performing an
effective audit. Currently, this is accomplished by using a highly-structured,
manual hypertext system. While quite effective, the system is difficult and
time-consuming to maintain, and can become unwieldy when conducting an audit
for a very large company.
We are in the process of developing an electronic system to meet the needs of this complex task. The complexity of the referencing system challenges current hypertext and user interface technology. At the same time, the structure of the domain affords an interesting application area within which to explore and more fully develop hypertext techniques. During the course of this project, we are exploring automatic generation of links, automatic generation of documents, hypertext path creation and access, creation of a typed-link topology for the domain, referencing of individual points and regions within documents, linking bodies of hypertext, and many other issues. | |||
| Computational Hypertext in Biological Modelling | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 181-197 | |
| John L. Schnase; John J. Leggett | |||
| This paper describes an application of hypertext to a biological research
problem. An individual energetics model for Cassin's Sparrow was developed in
which the computations and intellectual activities associated with each phase
of the research were performed within an integrated hypertext environment. The
study demonstrates the effectiveness of computational hypertext in meeting the
personal information management requirements of individual researchers in the
natural sciences and its ability to speed the dissemination of research results
within a community of scholars. Most important, the study shows how hypertext
can be "phased in" to support traditional scholarship in disciplines that are
otherwise slow to respond to emerging computer technologies. Keywords: Computational hypertext, Hypertext publishing, Information management,
Collaboration, Simulation modelling, Natural sciences | |||
| Information Retrieval from Hypertext: Update on the Dynamic Medical Handbook Project | | BIBA | Full-Text | 199-212 | |
| Mark E. Frisse; Steve B. Cousins | |||
| This paper attempts to provide a perspective from which to develop a more complete theory of information retrieval from hypertext documents. Viewing hypertexts as large information spaces, we compare two general classes of navigation methods, classes we call local and global. We argue that global methods necessitate some form of "index space" conceptually separate from the hypertext "document space". We note that the architectures of both spaces effect the ease with which one can apply various information retrieval algorithms. We identify a number of different index space and document space architectures and we discuss some of the associated trade-offs between hypertext functionality and computational complexity. We show how some index space architectures can be exploited for enhanced information retrieval, query refinement, and automated reasoning. Through analysis of a number of prototype systems, we discuss current limitations and future potentials for various hypertext information retrieval structures. | |||
| A Retrieval Model for Incorporating Hypertext Links | | BIB | Full-Text | 213-224 | |
| W. Bruce Croft; Howard Turtle | |||
| The Use of Cluster Hierarchies in Hypertext Information Retrieval | | BIBA | Full-Text | 225-237 | |
| Donald B. Crouch; Carolyn J. Crouch; Glenn Andreas | |||
| The graph-traversal approach to hypertext information retrieval is a conceptualization of hypertext in which the structural aspects of the nodes are emphasized. A user navigates through such hypertext systems by evaluating the semantics associated with links between nodes as well as the information contained in nodes. In this paper we describe an hierarchical structure which effectively supports the graphical traversal of a document collection in a hypertext system. We provide an overview of an interactive browser based on cluster hierarchies. Initial results obtained from the use of the browser in an experimental hypertext retrieval system are presented. | |||
| The Matters that Really Matter for Hypertext Usability | | BIBA | Full-Text | 239-248 | |
| Jakob Nielsen | |||
| We compare 92 benchmark measurements of various usability issues related to hypertext which have been published in the hypertext literature in order to find which ones have shown the largest effects. | |||
| Expanding the Notion of Links | | BIB | Full-Text | 249-257 | |
| Steven J. DeRose | |||
| Hypertext and "the Hyperreal" | | BIB | Full-Text | 259-267 | |
| Stuart Moulthrop | |||
| Expressing Structural Hypertext Queries in GraphLog | | BIBA | Full-Text | 269-292 | |
| Mariano P. Consens; Alberto O. Mendelzon | |||
| GraphLog is a visual query language in which queries are formulated by
drawing graph patterns. The hyperdocument graph is searched for all
occurrences of these patterns. The language is powerful enough to allow the
specification and manipulation of arbitrary subsets of the network and supports
the computation of aggregate functions on subgraphs of the hyperdocument. It
can support dynamically defined structures as well as inference capabilities,
going beyond current static and passive hypertext systems.
The expressive power of the language is a fundamental issue: too little power limits the applications of the language, while too much makes efficient implementation difficult and probably affects ease of use. The complexity and expressive power of GraphLog can be characterized precisely by using notions from deductive database theory and descriptive complexity. In this paper, from a practical point of view, we present examples of GraphLog queries applied to several different hypertext systems, providing evidence for the expressive power of the language, as well as for the convenience and naturalness of its graphical representation. We also describe an ongoing implementation of the language. | |||
| VISAR: A System for Inference and Navigation in Hypertext | | BIBA | Full-Text | 293-304 | |
| Peter Clitherow; Doug Riecken; Michael Muller | |||
| Hypertext systems have traditionally been constructed by hand. This process
can stand improvement in several aspects: it is laborious; requires a human to
understand the text and infer all the relationships between the
concepts/topics; and while the resulting hypertext may be traversed by a reader
in an arbitrary fashion, s/he may still find it difficult to understand the
concepts as expressed by the builder of the hypertext.
We present a knowledge-intensive assistant for building hypertext fragments from a knowledge base customised both explicitly and implicitly by a user. Such a presentation may clarify relationships between concepts that were present implicitly in multiple sources of information. In the domain of an intelligent information retrieval system, we show how such an assistant may render customised views of knowledge extracted in manageable form. While the presentation medium of the original system is graphic, we also speculate that presentation of the information in alternative hypermedia appears to be straightforward. | |||
| What To Do When There's Too Much Information | | BIBA | Full-Text | 305-318 | |
| Michael Lesk | |||
| Hypertext systems with small units of text are likely to drown the user with information, in the same way that online catalogs or bibliographic retrieval systems often do. Experiments with a catalog of 800,000 book citations have shown two useful ways of dealing with the "too many hits" problem. One is a display of phrases containing the excessively frequent words; another is a display of titles by hierarchical category. The same techniques should apply to other text-based retrieval systems. In general, interactive solutions seem more promising than attempts to do detailed query analysis and get things right the first time. | |||
| The Role of External Representations in the Writing Process: Implications for the Design of Hypertext-Based Writing Tools | | BIBA | Full-Text | 319-341 | |
| Christine M. Neuwirth; David S. Kaufer | |||
| The long-range goal of the research reported here is to study the role of
hypertext-based external representations in augmenting performance on a
cognitively complex task, in particular, on a synthesis writing task. The
production of a written synthesis is a challenging task that requires managing
large amounts of information over an extended period of time. Thus, synthesis
writing is a task that is well-suited for testing the potential of hypertext
technologies to support work on complex tasks.
From a case study of experts and novices, we have developed a theory of the cognitive processes involved in producing a written synthesis. We have also developed a preliminary theory of the role of external representations in the writing process. We have drawn upon these two theories to design several hypertext-based external representations that we believe will augment writers' performance on a written synthesis task. The hypertext-based applications include a general graph object and a table object; these objects form the foundation for a set of specialized tools to support synthesis writing, namely, a summary graph, synthesis grid and synthesis tree. | |||
| From Ideas and Arguments to Hyperdocuments: Travelling through Activity Spaces | | BIB | Full-Text | 343-364 | |
| Norbert A. Streitz; Jorg Hannemann; Manfred Thuring | |||
| InterNote: Extending a Hypermedia Framework to Support Annotative Collaboration | | BIBA | Full-Text | 365-378 | |
| Timothy Catlin; Paulette Bush; Nicole Yankelovich | |||
| Based on three years of user feedback, a design team at IRIS embarked on a project to enhance Intermedia to better support small groups of collaborators, particularly those involved with document review and revision. Towards this end, we defined user-level requirements for the new functionality. The result of this process was the design and implementation of InterNote. One aspect of InterNote involves a fundamental extension to Intermedia's navigational linking paradigm. Instead of simply being able to traverse links, users are now also able to transfer data across the links using a technique we call warm linking. In this paper we describe extensions to our hypermedia framework to support annotative collaboration, including the user interface of the new linking functionality and the InterNote extension. Finally, we discuss our plans for future work. | |||
| Interchanging Hypertexts | | BIB | Full-Text | 379-381 | |
| Robert Akscyn; Frank Halasz; Tim Oren; Victor Riley; Lawrence Welch | |||
| Hypertext, Narrative, and Consciousness | | BIBA | Full-Text | 383-384 | |
| Michael Joyce; Nancy Kaplan; John McDaid; Stuart Moulthrop | |||
| This panel attempts to initiate a dialogue on the implications of hypertext between information theorists and literary theorists, writers of texts and designers of text systems. Though the panelists base their views on several years of practical work with hypertext in education, they are concerned with broader social and conceptual problems raised by this technology -- its likely effect on the way we teach ourselves and others to understand texts and the way we use those texts to construct an orderly (or disorderly) world. It seems important to raise these issues at Hypertext'89 because hypertext is rapidly being recognized by humanists as a crucial and revolutionary enterprise. This recognition creates an opportunity for humanists and scientists to convene a productive dialogue which could have great significance both for hypertext and for the future of the humanities. We hope for a frank and free-ranging exchange of views and emphasize that this is a forum for questioning and controversy, not a series of monologues. Each panelist will deliver a ten-minute position statements, with the remaining hour of the session devoted to discussion. Abstracts of the three presentations follow. | |||
| Lessons Learned from the ACM Hypertext on Hypertext Project | | BIB | Full-Text | 385-386 | |
| Bernard Rous; Ben Shneiderman; Nicole Yankelovich; Elise Yoder | |||
| Indexing and Hypertext | | BIB | Full-Text | 387-390 | |
| Mark Bernstein; James Critz; Nancy Mulvany; Rosemary Simpson; Mary-Claire van Leunen | |||
| Expert Systems and Hypertext | | BIB | Full-Text | 391-392 | |
| Michael Bieber; Steve Feiner; Mark Frisse; Phil Hayes; Gerri Peper; Walt Scacchi | |||
| Hypertext and Higher Education: A Reality Check | | BIB | Full-Text | 393 | |
| Stephen C. Ehrmann; Steven Erde; Kenneth Morrell; Ronald F. E. Weissman | |||
| Hypertext and Software Engineering | | BIB | Full-Text | 395-396 | |
| Robert Balzer; Michael Begeman; Pankaj K. Garg; Mayer Schwartz; Ben Shneiderman | |||
| Cognitive Aspects of Designing Hypertext Systems | | BIB | Full-Text | 397 | |
| Pat Baird; Dennis Egan; Walter Kintsch; John Smith; Norbert A. Streitz | |||
| Confessions -- What's Wrong with Our Systems | | BIB | 399 | |
| Frank Halasz; Don McCracken; Norman Meyrowitz; Amy Pearl; Ben Shneiderman | |||