Designing Interactive Hypermedia Systems

This book aims at exploring and illustrating the different ways in which hypermedia systems and tools are designed according to those aspects. The design and visualization schemes included in any system will be related to the variety of social and technical complexities confronted by researchers in social, communication, humanities, art and design.

This book aims at exploring and illustrating the different ways in which hypermedia systems and tools are designed according to those aspects. The design and visualization schemes included in any system will be related to the variety of social and technical complexities confronted by researchers in social, communication, humanities, art and design.

"This book introduces a new professional in the context of the information science, technology, and management called an 'heuristic assessor of qualitative communicability in interactive systems'"--Provided by publisher.

This most unusual book results from the NATO Advanced Research Work shop, "Designing Hypertext/Hypermedia for Learning", held in Rottenburg am Neckar, FRO, from July 3-8, 1989. The idea for the workshop resulted from the burgeoning interest in hypertext combined with the frustrating lack of literature on leaming applications for hypertext. There was little evidence in 1988 that hypertext could successfully support learning out comes. A few projects were investigating hypertext for learning, but few conclusions were available and little if any advice on how to design hyper text for learning applications was available. Could hypertext support learning objectives? What mental processing requirements are unique to learning outcomes? How would the processing requirements of learning outcomes interact with unique user processing requirements of browsing and constructing hypertext? Should hypertext information bases be restruc tured to accommodate learning outcomes? Should the user interface be manipulated in order to support the task functionality of learning outcomes? Does the hypertext structure reflect the intellectual requirements of learning outcomes? What kinds of learning-oriented hypertext systems were being developed and what kinds of assumptions were these systems making? These and other questions demonstrated the need for this workshop. The workshop included presentations, hardware demonstrations, sharing and browsing of hypertexts, and much discussion about all of the above. These were the experiences that you, the reader of this book, unfortunately did not experience.

One can observe that a wide range of human activities involves various forms of de sign. Especially if the goal implies the creation of an artifact, design is at the very center of these activities. It is the general understanding in the public to place design especially in the context of, for example, fashion, furniture, household items, cars, and architecture or in a more general way at the intersection of art and engineering. Of course, in the field of information technology, developers of software and hard ware are called system 'designers'. Design can be identified and considered in the context of many activities related to pUblishing: creating a product ad in a magazine, designing the layout of a newspaper, authoring a book. Summarizing these exam ples as 'creating documents', these are activities where two challenges with respect to design have to be met. Designing the content, its structure, and its relationship to the existing knowledge of potential readers is one, while the other refers to the 'rhetorical' aspects including designing the presentation of the material in order to communicate the content. Publishing is communicating knowledge.

Kaj Grønbæk and Randall H. Trigg present a set of principles for the design of open hypermedia systems and provide concrete implications of these principles for issues ranging from data structures to architectures and system integration, and for settings as diverse as the World Wide Web and the workplace. In this book Kaj Grønbæk and Randall H. Trigg present a set of principles for the design of open hypermedia systems and provide concrete implications of these principles for issues ranging from data structures to architectures and system integration, and for settings as diverse as the World Wide Web and the workplace.The principles, which cover both hypermedia system processing and data structures, reflect results from decades of hypermedia research, including the popular Dexter hypertext reference model and the authors own extended object-oriented version of the Dexter model. One important principle is the notion of links as first-class objects outside the data. Emerging systems such as HyperWave, Microcosm, and Devise Hypermedia apply this principle to extend the capabilities of the Web. The authors also discuss the management of incomplete and dangling links, time-based media including video and sound, support for collaboration and shared hypermedia structures, worldwide distribution, and integration of third-party applications in open hypermedia systems.

This is the latest volume in the 'Workshops in Computing' series, and contains papers from the International Workshop on Hpyermedia Design, held in Montpellier, France, from 1 - 2 June 1995. The workshop aimed to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the many facets of hypermedia design. Among the specific topics covered by the papers are: design methods, multimedia modelling, higher structures in hypermedia design spaces, user-interface design for hypermedia, building distributed web applications, and hyperdialogs. The resulting volume provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this important field. It will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and students involved in any aspect of hypermedia design.