Navigation without Links and Nodes without Contents: Intensional Navigation in a Third-Order Hypermedia System
H.C Arents, Walter Bogaerts · New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia · 1993
The key to unlocking the navigation potential of hypertext and hypermedia systems lies in a more semantics-aware indexing of the interrelated information stored in these systems. We first highlight briefly the different indexing techniques which have been proposed for hypertext and hypermedia systems, and we then discuss the so-called semantic hyperindexing technique which we have recently developed to represent the significant relations between hypertextual information. We discuss in detail how this technique is being used to support intensional navigation in a third-order hypermedia system, based on the definition of meaningful traversal trails between semantically associated nodes, which the reader can navigate freely at his own discretion while still being gently guided by the system. Finally, we consider the graphical notation which we have developed to help the authors in visualizing these intensionally defined traversal trails, and we discuss how the use of this notation improves the productiveness of the authors during trail design.