Separable Hyperstructure and Delayed Link Binding

As the amount of material on the World Wide Web continues to grow, users are discovering that the Web's embedded, hard-coded, links are difficult to maintain and update. Hyperlinks need a degree of abstraction in the way they are specified together with a sound underlying document structure and the property of separability from the documents they are linking. The case is made by studying the advantages of program/data separation in computer system architectures and also by re-examining some selected hypermedia systems that have already implemented separability. The prospects for introducing more abstract links into future versions of HTML and PDF, via emerging standards such as XPath, XPointer XLink and URN, are briefly discussed

Hytexpros : a hypermedia information retrieval system

The Hypermedia information retrieval system makes use of the specific capabilities of hypermedia systems with information retrieval operations and provides new kind of information management tools. It combines both hypermedia and information retrieval to offer end-users the possibility of navigating, browsing and searching a large collection of documents to satisfy an information need. TEXPROS is an intelligent document processing and retrieval system that supports storing, extracting, classifying, categorizing, retrieval and browsing enterprise information. TEXPROS is a perfect application to apply hypermedia information retrieval techniques. In this dissertation, we extend TEXPROS to a hypermedia information retrieval system called HyTEXPROS with hypertext functionalities, such as node, typed and weighted links, anchors, guided-tours, network overview, bookmarks, annotations and comments, and external linkbase. It describes the whole information base including the metadata and the original documents as network nodes connected by links. Through hypertext functionalities, a user can construct dynamically an information path by browsing through pieces of the information base. By adding hypertext functionalities to TEXPROS, HyTEXPROS is created. It changes its working domain from a personal document process domain to a personal library domain accompanied with citation techniques to process original documents. A four-level conceptual architecture is presented as the system architecture of HyTEXPROS. Such architecture is also referred to as the reference model of HyTEXPROS. Detailed description of HyTEXPROS, using the First Order Logic Calculus, is also proposed. An early version of a prototype is briefly described

Augmenting applications with hyper media, functionality and meta-information

The Dynamic Hypermedia Engine (DHE) enhances analytical applications by adding relationships, semantics and other metadata to the application\u27s output and user interface. DHE also provides additional hypermedia navigational, structural and annotation functionality. These features allow application developers and users to add guided tours, personal links and sharable annotations, among other features, into applications. DHE runs as a middleware between the application user interface and its business logic and processes, in a n-tier architecture, supporting the extra functionalities without altering the original systems by means of application wrappers. DHE automatically generates links at run-time for each of those elements having relationships and metadata. Such elements are previously identified using a Relation Navigation Analysis. DHE also constructs more sophisticated navigation techniques not often found on the Web on top of these links. The metadata, links, navigation and annotation features supplement the application\u27s primary functionality. This research identifies element types, or classes , in the application displays. A mapping rule encodes each relationship found between two elements of interest at the class level . When the user selects a particular element, DHE instantiates the commands included in the rules with the actual instance selected and sends them to the appropriate destination system, which then dynamically generates the resulting virtual (i.e. not previously stored) page. DHE executes concurrently with these applications, providing automated link generation and other hypermedia functionality. DHE uses the extensible Markup Language (XMQ -and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets of XML recommendations, like Xlink, XML Schema, and RDF -to encode the semantic information required for the operation of the extra hypermedia features, and for the transmission of messages between the engine modules and applications. DHE is the only approach we know that provides automated linking and metadata services in a generic manner, based on the application semantics, without altering the applications. DHE will also work with non-Web systems. The results of this work could also be extended to other research areas, such as link ranking and filtering, automatic link generation as the result of a search query, metadata collection and support, virtual document management, hypermedia functionality on the Web, adaptive and collaborative hypermedia, web engineering, and the semantic Web

A Study of Information Fragment Association in Information Management and Retrieval Applications

As we strive to identify useful information sifting through the vast number of resources available to us, we often find that the desired information is residing in a small section within a larger body of content which does not necessarily contain similar information. This can make this Information Fragment difficult to find. A Web search engine may not provide a good ranking to a page of unrelated content if it contains only a very small yet invaluable piece of relevant information. This means that our processes often fail to bring together related Information Fragments. We can easily conceive of two Information Fragments which according to a scholar bear a strong association with each other, yet contain no common keywords enabling them to be collocated by a keyword search.This dissertation attempts to address this issue by determining the benefits of enhancing information management and retrieval applications by providing users with the capability of establishing and storing associations between Information Fragments. It estimates the extent to which the efficiency and quality of information retrieval can be improved if users are allowed to capture mental associations they form while reading Information Fragments and share these associations with others using a functional registry-based design. In order to test these benefits three subject groups were recruited and assigned tasks involving Information Fragments. The first two tasks compared the performance and usability of a mainstream social bookmarking tool with a tool enhanced with Information Fragment Association capabilities. The tests demonstrated that the use of Information Fragment Association offers significant advantages both in the efficiency of retrieval and user satisfaction. Analysis of the results of the third task demonstrated that a mainstream Web search engine performed poorly in collocating interrelated fragments when a query designed to retrieve the one of these fragments was submitted. The fourth task demonstrated that Information Fragment Association improves the precision and recall of searches performed on Information Fragment datasets.The results of this study indicate that mainstream information management and retrieval applications provide inadequate support for Information Fragment retrieval and that their enhancement with Information Fragment Association capabilities would be beneficial

Paradigms for the design of multimedia learning environments in engineering

The starting point for this research was the belief that interactive multimedia learning environments represent a significant evolution in computer based learning and therefore their design requires a re-examination of the underlying principles of learning and knowledge representation. Current multimedia learning environments (MLEs) can be seen as descendants of the earlier technologies of computer-aided learning (CAL), intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) and videodisc-based learning systems. As such they can benefit from much of the wisdom which emerged from those technologies. However, multimedia can be distinguished from earlier technologies by its much greater facility in bringing to the learner high levels of interaction with and control over still and moving image, animation, sound and graphics. Our intuition tells us that this facility has the potential to create learning environments which are not merely substitutes for "live" teaching, but which are capable of elucidating complex conceptual knowledge in ways which have not previously been possible. If the potential of interactive multimedia for learning is to be properly exploited then it needs to be better understood. MLEs should not just be regarded as a slicker version of CAL, ITS or videodisc but a new technology requiring a reinterpretation of the existing theories of learning and knowledge representation. The work described in this thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which MLEs can aid learning. A knowledge engineering approach was taken to the design of a MLE for civil engineers. This involved analysing in detail the knowledge content of the learning domain in terms of different paradigms of human learning and knowledge representation. From this basis, a design strategy was developed which matched the nature of the domain knowledge to the most appropriate delivery techniques. The Cognitive Apprenticeship Model (CAM) was shown to be able to support the integration and presentation of the different categories of knowledge in a coherent instructional framework. It is concluded that this approach is helpful in enabling designers of multimedia systems both to capture and to present a rich picture of the domain. The focus of the thesis is concentrated on the domain of Civil Engineering and the learning of concepts and design skills within that domain. However, much of it could be extended to other highly visual domains such as mechanical engineering. Many of the points can also be seen to be much more widely relevant to the design of any MLE.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Counci