Knowledge-based editing and visualization for hypermedia encyclopedias

Christoph Hüser, Klaus Reichenberger, Lothar Rostek, Norbert A. Streitz
1995 Communications of the ACM  
O ne of the main goals in developing digital libraries is to provide users with opportunities for accessing and using information in highly flexible and user-oriented ways not available in current information repositories.This implies a focus on supporting the intellectual access to information and to consider the context of the information request. Systems for digital libraries should be able to select the appropriate type and amount of information from a comprehensive pool and compose it on
more » ... e fly for a meaningful and coherent presentation which might have never occurred before or never will again after this event because it is customized to the current situation. In order to meet these goals, one has to adopt a new perspective towards information retrieval, the notion of documents, and publishing in general. This is achieved by utilizing the paradigm shift currently taking place in electronic publishing caused by hypertext and hypermedia. That is, no longer viewing documents as static entities published at one point in time in a definite form, but as dynamic and networked collections of information composed on demand and presented with possibilities for interaction. This also allows for multiple views on the content according to different aspects of interest initiated by different users. At the Integrated Publications and Information Systems Institute (GMD-IPSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, we are developing concepts and tools supporting the production and use of innovative publication products as flexibly compiled cross-sectional information collections. These efforts are part of the Europublishing project which is funded by the European R&D program RACE II. As a concrete application, we use the Dictionary of Art which is to be published this year by Macmillan Publishers Ltd., U.K., as a 34-volume print edition. More than 6,000 authors and 50 editors have been involved in its conventional publication process for over 15 years. Our research focuses on providing support for the complex and demanding editorial work and on the presentation of hypermedia publications (see Figure 1 ). Like digital library applications, the Dictionary of Art poses problems of large amounts of information and thus of individual access involving the selection and combination of information which is put together by users demands. As is true for all electronic publication products, there is the additional challenge to meet the quality standards of traditional publishing, in particular of design and layout when presenting the information on the screen. Our approach for meeting these requirements is based on the three concepts which also reflect the overall process. First, we use an object-oriented representation of a formal representation of facts which
doi:10.1145/205323.205333 fatcat:2e6gt42vrrhdddg35ipr3ndgmi