Don't link me in
H. Van Dyke Parunak · 1991
Hypermediais often described as nodes of information with links between them, suggesting the conceptual model of a graph.A broader definition is a system of nodes of information through which people can move nonlinearly.Such a definition, while including graph-based hypermedia, also allows alternative implementations.This paper illustrates the need for alternative models by exhibiting a particular reasoning task for which navigating among nodes by way of explicit links is less effective than an alternative model of intersecting sets of nodes.The task is taxonomic reasoning, a particular kind of reasoning task that deals with the comparison and classification of highly similar nodes, in which an analyst viewing one node thinks not in terms of linking it to another node, but of including it in or excluding it from a set of related nodes.This paper discusses this kind of reasoning and describes HyperSet, a set-based hypermedia system designed to support it.It compares HyperSet with other tools that support taxonomic reasoning, discusses the formal and implementational relationships between graph-based and set-based hypermedia, and defines the features that are required in a hybrid system that can concurrently support both set and graph manipulations.