Helping the User to Select a Link
Ivan Tomek, Hermann A. Maurer · New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia · 1992
Links are among the distinguishing features of hypermedia and much research revolves around them. We survey issues related to links and address the problem of presenting links in such a way that the user can choose the most appropriate link. This issue is particularly important when a large number of links is available, a subject that has not received much attention yet but will become important as hypermedia document bases grow. We show that presentation of links can be dealt with by filtering out links that are not of interest to the user and by ranking the remaining nodes to simplify choice. After listing several heuristic approaches, we propose a method based on two quantitative measures of knowledge. This method can be used for rigorous numeric ranking of links on the basis of their contribution to the user's total knowledge.