1,720,969 research outputs found
An Annotative Approach to Better Hyperauthoring and Associative Linking
No full textEarly hypertext visionaries proposed entire online archives of the world's literature, with everything associatively linked to everything else. Today, the most widespread hypertext system is the World-Wide Web (WWW), a publicly accessible and globally distributed medium. However, the WWW is not living up to the promise of hypertext associativity - the majority of hypertext linking on the WWW is estimated to be intended for navigational purposes only. WWW authors typically have new ideas to contribute, and assert particular relationships between these and existing ideas already published in order to demonstrate both the reliability of the conceptual foundation being built on, and the innovation and significance of the new ideas. However, these associations are rarely rendered as associative links which seamlessly link the new material into the global context. This research investigates the possibility of capturing these implicit inter-document associations through annotation, and then using these annotations to assist the hyperauthoring process. The hypothesis of this work is therefore that by capturing inter-document associations through annotation, a better hyperauthoring process will result, both in terms of the quality and coverage of the new writing, and in terms of the seamless (associative) integration with the global context, helping the WWW evolve to achieve all of its potential hypertextual richness. The Annotation LInking ENvironment (ALIEN) has been implemented to demonstrate techniques for capturing inter-document associations made by an author whilst reading, using free form annotations. Further work proposed includes the re-purposing of these captured associations to assist the authoring and linking processes through dynamic visualisation of the association structures "as-you-type", and automatic associative linking
Everything Integrated: A Framework for Associative Writing in the Web
No full textHypermedia is the vision of the complete integration of all information in any media, including text, image, audio and video. The depth and diversity of the World-Wide Web, the most successful and farthest-reaching hypermedia system to date, has tremendous potential to provide such an integrated docuverse. This thesis explores the issues and challenges surrounding the realisation of this potential through the process of Associative Writing - the authoring and publishing of integrated hypertexts which connect a writer's new contributions to the wider context of relevant existing material. Through systematically examining archived Web pages and carrying out a real-world case study, this work demonstrates that Associative Writing is an important and valid process, and furthermore that there is (albeit limited) evidence that some writers are adopting Associative Writing strategies in the Web. However, in investigating the issues facing these writers, five core challenges have been identified which may be barriers to a more widespread adoption of Associative Writing: (1) the lost in hyperspace problem, (2) legal issues over deep linking to copyrighted material, (3) the limitations of the Web hypertext model, (4) Web link integrity, and (5) that popular word-processor based Web writing tools do not adequately support each of the writing activities involved in Associative Writing. In response to these challenges, this thesis introduces the Associative Writing Framework, building on open hypertext, Semantic Web, hypertext writing, and hypertext annotation work to provide a novel interface for supporting browsing, reading, annotation, linking, and integrated writing. Although conceived in terms of supporting a generic Associative Writing scenario, the framework has been applied to the specific domain of intertextual dance analysis in order to carry out a focused evaluation. Initial indications are that the framework method is valid, and that continued work to promote and evaluate its more general applicability is worthwhile
Experience Report: Serving Hypermedia and the Web Online with HA3L
No full textHA3L is an agent-based adaptive hypermedia system which uses existing technology developed by the IAM group in the form of the SoFAR agent framework and the Auld Linky contextual hypermedia structure service. In a nutshell, HA3L provides guided tours of a topic which are adapted according to user preferences. The book Hypermedia and the Web, by David Lowe and Wendy Hall, outlines an engineering approach to the design and management of Web hypermedia applications. Lowe and Hall wish to create an online resource which compliments (but which does merely replicate) the content presented in the book, providing extra material and examples, and which provides adaptive presentations of its content tailored to individual visitors to the site. The purpose of this report is firstly to briefly recount my experiences in getting to grips with the operation of HA3L, and secondly to describe how I have applied the system to provide adaptive tours through part of the Hypermedia and the Web book. The suitability of HA3L for serving an online, adaptive Hypermedia and the Web resource is also briefly discussed
MetaPortal Final Report: Building Ontological Hypermedia with the OntoPortal Framework
No full textThis report details the OntoPortal project conducted for the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), UK. The specification called for a well-interlinked and incrementally updateable web site detailing the latest research in metadata. The type of information to integrate included information on literature, projects, researchers, organisations, software and standards
Is the WWW Killing Hypermedia?
No full textAs a group that has spent many years applying open hypermedia technologies to the Web, we have long been interested in finding out how in practice people are building Web sites: what anchors they are choosing to link from in their own pages and what pages they are choosing to link to. Since the first use of the terms hypertext and hypermedia by Nelson in the mid-1960's, associative linking has been at the heart of the hypermedia authoring, and is the essence of non-sequential writing - this is the type of linking that we were most keen to investigate
Looking for Linking: Associative Links on the Web
No full textNon-trivial hypertexts (containing more than one node) use links to implement their internal structure. On the Web navigation bars have become ubiquitous, defining functional regions on a web page that expose a site’s primary structure, listing nearby pages or media (home page, next page, previous page, search, related links). By contrast, associative linking takes place in the content regions of Web pages and may be used to interlink related concepts from the domain semantics, expose argumentation structures, add glossary functions or reveal instructional components according to various secondary informational schemas or controlling “applications”. In this paper we describe an attempt to identify the latter kind of links on the World Wide Web, as the preliminary stage of recognising and classifying “good” linking practices that go beyond the merely organisational infrastructure common to the Web
Writing and Reading Hypermedia on the Web
No full textThe Web is a linked literature: we wish to discover what the authors of Web pages are choosing to link and what they are choosing to link to. It is hoped that understanding interconnectedness as it is practised in the Web through links will enable us to see what kinds of hypertext are achievable using common technologies and what is impracticable. Understanding the arrangement of the links helps us to understand the construction of the page as a whole which in turn helps us to understand the purpose of the links. This paper discusses a search for examples of good subject-based hypertext linking, the linking statistics that we drew from those pages and the linking practises that the statistics represent. We also show how the analysis of how hypertext links are written can be applied to the problem of Web page reading in non-standard and reduced-bandwidth Web browsing applications
Decentering the Dancing Text: From Dance Intertext to Hypertext
No full textThis paper explains and draws together two projects from different disciplines: dance studies and hypertext writing. Each project sets out to examine the processes and practices of hypertextuality, and to develop new ways of writing using electronic technology and the Internet. The dance studies project seeks to link the critical theory of intertextuality (as a means of dance interpretation) with the theoretical and practical concerns of hypertextuality. It hopes to show a convergence of the two into a working system for analysing dance in a network of people, institutions and information. The Associative Writing Framework (AWF) project seeks to explore how writers could best be supported in representing and exploring hypertextuality in a Web environment, and in producing new hypertexts which integrate or 'glue together' existing Web resources (ideas, concepts, data, descriptions, experiences, claims, theories, suggestions, reports, etc). Following the combining of the two projects we report on some initial evaluation of the AWF system by dance experts, and discuss where the relationship might lead and potential future outcomes of the collaboration
Hypertext in the Semantic Web
No full textThe Semantic Web extends the current state of the Web with well-defined meaning. We advocate the use of ontological hypertext as an application of the Semantic Web to provide a principled and structured approach to navigating the resources on the Web. This paper demonstrates how we have applied this concept to two real-world scenarios
Evolving a Digital Library Environment to the Changing Needs of its Users
No full textA digital archive, together with its users and its contents, does not exist in isolation - there is a cycle of activities which provides the context for the archive's existence. In arguing for the broadening of the traditional view of digital libraries as merely collections towards the processes of collecting and deploying we have developed an "extended" digital library environment for orthopaedic surgeons which bridges the gap between the undertaking of experimental work and the dissemination of its results through electronic publication. However, in embracing such an approach, we must also consider that the archive should be able to evolve in accordance with the changing needs of its users --- we cannot predict in advance the myriad different types of experiment that future users will want to carry out. This paper therefore discusses our recent efforts in addressing this is sue through the implementation of a user-oriented Template Generation Toolkit
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