Automatic generation and refinement of hypertext links

Abstract

Current generation of hypertext systems suffer from the limitations that they are static in nature, and they do not support the automated process of link creation very well. Because of the efforts involved in manually creating links, the hyperbases created using these systems are seldom modified even when they were found not to fully support the requirements of the intended users. This paper studies the development of automated tools to aid in the process of link creation, browsing, and link refinement. Only relation links are considered in this study. The automated tools are developed to help in three of the major stages of developing and using hypertext applications: (a) during authoring to generate a set of relation links between pairs of nodes; (b) during browsing to recommend an optimal set of starting nodes for the users to begin browsing, and to guide the users at each stage of browsing by suggesting a set of “next” nodes to traverse; and, (c) during training to modify, remove and add links based on users' feedback data collected. The training will result in long-term changes in the hypertext structure.

In order to test the effectiveness of the training process objectively, a navigator is built to simulate the browsing activities of the users. The effects of training have been evaluated on two text collections using a variety of objective measures. The results indicate that the training process has improved the effectiveness of the hyperbase to support browsing.     

ParaSite: mining structural information on the Web

Web information retrieval tools typically make use of only the text on pages, ignoring valuable information implicitly contained in links. At the other extreme, viewing the Web as a traditional hypertext system would also be mistake, because heterogeneity, cross-domain links, and the dynamic nature of the Web mean that many assumptions of typical hypertext systems do not apply. The novelty of the Web leads to new problems in information access, and it is necessary to make use of the new kinds of information available, such as multiple independent categorization, naming, and indexing of pages. This paper discusses the varieties of link information (not just hyperlinks) on the Web, how the Web differs from conventional hypertext, and how the links can be exploited to build useful applications. Specific applications presented as part of the ParaSite system find individuals' homepages, new locations of moved pages, and unindexed information.     

Using XML for Supplemental Hypertext Support

Our overall research goal is providing hypertext functionality through the WWW to hypertext-unaware information systems with minimal or no changes to the information systems. Information systems dynamically generate their contents and thus require some mapping mechanism to automatically map the generated contents to hypertext constructs (nodes, links, and link markers) instead of hypertext links being hard-coded over static contents. No systematic approach exists, however, for building mapping routines to create useful links that give users direct access to the ISs' primary functionality, give access to metainformation about IS objects, and enable annotation and ad hoc (user-declared) linking. This paper contributes a procedure for analyzing ISs and building mapping routines that supplement information systems with hypertext support. This paper also contributes an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) DTD that declares a set of elements and attributes for representing mapped information in a human-readable, machine-readable, structured, and semantic way. We implemented a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of using XML to represent mapped information.     

Knowledge acquisition using hypertext

This paper addresses the issue of supporting knowledge acquisition using hypertext. We propose a way of tightly integrating hypertext and structured object representation, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) frames for the basic representation of hypertext nodes. Epistemologically, a dual view of the resulting space is of interest. One view is that of hypertext which emphasizes nodes containg g text, including formal knowledge representation. The other view focuses on objects with certain relationships, which define a semantic network. Both in hypertext and in semantic networks the relations between chunks of knowledge are explicitly represented by links. However, in today's hypertext systems a node typically contains just informal text and references to other nodes. Our approach additionally facilitates the explicit representation of structure “inside” hypertext nodes using partitions. We show the usefulness of such a tight integration for knowledge acquisition, providing several features useful for supporting it based on a level of basic hypertext functionality. In particular, we sketch a method for doing knowledge acquisition in such an environment. Hypertext is used as a mediating “semiformal” representation, which allows experts to directly represent knowledge without the immediate support of knowledge engineers. These help then to make this knowledge operational, supported by the system's facility to provide templates as well as their links to the semiformal representation. As an example of our results of using this method of knowledge acquisition, we illustrate the strategic knowledge in our application domain. More generally, our approach supports important aspects of (software) engineering knowledge-based systems and their maintenance. Also their user interface can be improved this way.     

Quotations in scholarly text: Converting existing documents to hypertext

A crucial issue in hypertext design is how to give the reader new capabilities without taking any existing ones away. This paper discusses the conversion of traditional, printed scholarly text to hypertext, focusing on the presentation of the explicit links between texts that are represented by direct quotations. It first examines how quotations are used by the author and the reader in traditional text. It then considers the conversion of scholarly text to hypertext, concentrating on how direct quotations should be handled. Three specific areas are examined: (i) what kinds of links are necessary, and what they should link together, (ii) how the linked texts should be divided into sections or nodes, and (iii) how the links and nodes should be displayed to the reader. The paper concludes by listing some recommendations for the conversion of scholarly text to hypertext.Stephanie W. Haas is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in natural language processing and information retrieval. Her most recent publications concern the vocabulary and structure of sublanguages.     

The relative effectiveness of hypertext and text

A series of two experiments was conducted. In Experiment 1, participant performance when using a hypertext electronic reference system was compared to using a conventional reference book. The links in this hypertext were based on the index entries in the corresponding 529‐page book. Specific topics and particular facts were located much faster and more accurately using the hypertext system than for the book. These advantages increased when participants searched for information that was either not included or referred to indirectly in the index. However, hypertext did not have an advantage over text on learning tasks. The conclusion was that hypertext is superior to text only for “reading‐to‐do” tasks similar to those a designer may perform when consulting a reference book. Experiment 2 compared user performance when the links corresponded exactly to the original index of a 545‐page textbook on ergonomics to performance when the links were generated by computer key‐word searches. Strong advantages were found in speed, accuracy, and subjective ratings for links based on the author's original index. It appears that these latter results can be attributed to the greater focus of the information provided by links based on the author's index. Users spent much less time browsing irrelevant sections of the book.     

Broadbutton Node Linking — A Generalised Approach to Hyperbase Navigation

Hypertext systems operate by establishing links within information, Links are normally established by an author, although some systems — GUIDE, for example — make little distinction between author and user, permitting deliberate modification of existing connections. However, linking between nodes, whether by original author or later user, is typically an active process. Producing effective hypertext links involves knowledge both of the system and of the particular data set within it.

I suggest that efficient link building might be greatly facilitated, and existing systems given greater functionality, if two related modifications could be made. Firstly, more general or ‘broad-button’ nodal links could be created; I use the phrase ‘broad button’ linking to describe ranked connections established between areas of a hyperbase. The term is defined in detail below. Intended to be easily selectable, broad-button links would offer users the choice of a ranked list of destinations from any point within any node. Secondly, were nodes to be ranked in order of probable user choice, allowing users a degree of feedback following selection of a node would permit such ranking to be dynamically organised. Feedback of this kind also has potential in assisting automatic establishment of appropriate new links between nodes.

In this paper I describe how such modifications might be organised, and describe some experiments which are currently being planned and undertaken to evaluate the ‘broad-button linking’ process.     

Effectiveness of expert semantic knowledge as a navigational aid within hypertext

Hypertext systems parse documents into content nodes connected by machine supported links or relationships. Many hypertext researchers claim that the node-link relationships of hypertext provide an information organization that models the structure of human knowledge and should therefore facilitate information access (Fiderio 1988). Yet, failures of information access occur when users lack an understanding of the overall scope and organization of a hypertext system (Gay and Mazur 1991). To support this understanding, the present research incorporated expert-based domain semantics in the design of prosthetic devices for hypertext navigation. The task domain was documentation for a word processing system. In the first experiment, the pathfinder algorithm (Schvaneveldt 1990) and cluster analysis were used to identify a set of expertbased semantic relationships between word-processing concepts. The results from these analyses contributed to the design of two prostheses to assist hypertext navigation: A hierarchical index and a local semantic browser. These aids were tested in a second experiment, crossing type of on-line documentation (semantically enhanced hypertext or an alphabetically indexed text) with level of subject expertise (novice or expert). Both performance and strategy measures suggest that the semantic prostheses improved the accessibility of information for novice users without hampering expert performance.     

Task-based method for creating usable hypertext

Although large hypertext documentation systems have many benefits in the commercial world, they can be difficult to build and use. To help overcome both these obstacles, a method under development at Hewlett-Packard assists authors in creating usable hypertext. A Wizard of Oz experiment was done with traditional on-line documentation and hypertext documentation to see what users liked and disliked. The experiment showed the need for a set of hypertext construction rules to ensure usability. Following these rules, and with computer assistance, authors are expected to do a task analysis of users' activities, to identify critical objects and create content nodes for them, to create links between nodes within clearly defined and cognitively justified limits, and to conduct usability tests on the resulting hypertext volume. Whilst this method recognises the importance of good clear writing, the rules and suggested prectices are not primarily about writing or screen design, but about creating a coherent navigational web that ensures success among commercial users of hypertext. The authoring system described in this paper has been developed for the HP Help system, which has been adopted as the common help delivery system for developers of Common Open Systems Environments on Unix-like platforms.     

Age differences in the performance of hypertext perusal as a function of text topology

The present study examined the extent to which age had impacts on the performance of hypertext browsing and navigation as a function of text topology. Twenty senior adults and 20 younger adults (mean ages = 68.95 and 23.60 respectively) participated in an experiment where three levels of text linearity were manipulated. Results showed the older adult accessed fewer numbers of text nodes than the younger counterpart, which suggests that the aged appear at a disadvantage in browsing breadth. The older adult's less oriented browsing was evidenced by the larger number of nodes repeatedly visited, particularly when the network topology was perused. As for navigation, older people experienced greater disorientation given that they searched more links to locate the target node. This age difference was mainly derived from the disorientation occurring at the hybrid and network levels, with the hybrid condition resulting in the severest navigation confusion due to its mixed text structure. Implications for the design of hypertext that accommodates the age differences are discussed.     

Computer‐Based Financial Transaction Processing: The Zimbank Network

Abstract

Commercial connections are the fastest‐growing component of the Internet today, as more and more companies move to establish closer links with customers, business partners, vendors, and information resources via the network. The implications of the emerging electronic commerce for managers in less‐developed countries are examined here. This paper focuses on the managerial need to (1) understand the evolution of countries’ and companies’ approaches to electronic commerce, (2) gain insight into development phases and type of commercial activity that exist today, and (3) track changes that suggest where development may be headed.     

Fast and effective soft links

Inspired by requirements traceability problems, we present a method for implementing fast and effective hypertext links to specific locations within documents. These soft links do not depend on tags, markup, or closed tool sets, yet they can generally survive extensive edits to a document collection, allowing the targets of these links to be located in real collections after years of ongoing and frequent changes. We base our implementation of soft links on an existing passage retrieval algorithm, originally designed for question answering. The method treats the text surrounding the target of a soft link as a passage to be retrieved, creates a signature for that passage, and resolves the link by searching for the passage. The method is evaluated over a large collection of text and two large collections of source code, one written in the C programming language and one written in Java. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Incremental maintenance of semantic links in dynamically changing hypertext systems

One purported advantage of hypertext systems is the ability to move between semantically related parts of a document (or family of documents). If the document is undergoing frequent modification (for example while an author is writing a book or while a software design stored in the hypertext system is evolving) the question arises as to how to incrementally maintain semantic interconnections in the face of the modifications.

The paper presents an optimal technique for the incremental maintenance of such interconnections as a document evolves. The technique, based on theories of information retrieval based on lexical affinities and theories of incremental computation, updates semantic interconnections as nodes are checked into the hypertext system (either new or as a result of an edit). Because we use the semantic weight of lexical affinities to determine which affinities are meaningful in the global context of the document, introducing a new affinity or changing the weight of an existing affinity can potentially have an effect on any node in the system. The challenge met by our algorithm is to guarantee that despite this potentially arbitrary impact, we still update link information optimally.

Once established the semantic interconnections are used to allow the user to move from node to node based not on rigid connections but instead on dynamically determined semantic interrelationships among the nodes.     

基于时序逻辑的超文本描述

将基于时序逻辑的多媒体脚本描述模型从线性顺序时空关系描述推广到非线性时空关系的文本描述,提出了一种新的超文本模型,通过该模型可将超文本的观点,链和超文本结构的逐步求精过程在一个统一的框架内描述,使用该模型设计的一个超文本标注语言已经实现,并基于该语言开发了一个交互式超文本编著环境。     

Addressing Privacy Issues During Disaster Recovery

Abstract

Businesses possess a staggering amount of private and personally identifiable information (which I will collectively reference for the rest of this article as “PII”), not only about their customers, but also about their employees. Under which circumstances and representations was the information collected? How is that information being used? To whom is that information being transmitted? How is that information being stored? Who has access, authorized or not, to that information? Unfortunately, many, if not most, businesses do not know the answers to these questions even under normal business circumstances.     

An Inquiry-led Personalised Navigation System (IPNS) using multi-dimensional linkbases

The simplicity of the hypertext model behind the World Wide Web is a factor in its success, but this simplicity brings limitations. One of these limitations is embedding links in documents. Open Hypermedia addresses this by instead storing them in separate link databases. Meanwhile, the Adaptive Hypermedia approach seeks to enhance a user's experience by inserting personalised additional content and links on the web page. However, these techniques do not offer the user any control over the adaptation. In this paper, we propose the concept of a multi-dimensional linkbase for adaptive links presentation. Links are created and stored in a single, multi-dimensional, linkbase that provides presentation links based on the user's preferences and profile. We present a web-based system Inquiry-led Personalised Navigation System that implements this multi-dimensional concept for controlling its personalisation of hyperlinks. We give the results of our evaluation, which confirm that user-controlled adaptation is a satisfactory approach to providing users with control over personalisation, and can alleviate the link overload problem.