Helen Ashman

Fourth generation hypermedia

World Wide Web authors must cope in a hypermedia environment analogous to second-generation computing languages, building and managing most hypermedia links using simple anchors and single-step navigation. Following this analogy, sophisticated application environments on the World Wide Web will require third- and fourth-generation hypermedia features. Implementing third- and fourth-generation hypermedia involves designing both high-level hypermedia features and the high-level authoring environments system developers build for authors to specify them. We present a set of high-level hypermedia features including typed nodes and links, link attributes, structure-based query, transclusions, warm and hot links, private and public links, hypermedia access permissions, computed personalized links, external link databases, link update mechanisms, overviews, trails, guided tours, backtracking and history-based navigation. We ground our discussion in the hypermedia research literature, and illustrate each feature both from existing implementations and a running scenario. We also give some direction for implementing these on the World Wide Web and in other information systems.

Reappraising cognitive styles in adaptive web applications

The mechanisms for personalisation used in web applications are currently the subject of much debate amongst researchers from many diverse subject areas. One of the most contemporary ideas for user modelling in web applications is that of cognitive styles, where a users psychological preferences are assessed stored in a database and then used to provide personalised content and/or links. We describe user trials of a case study that utilises visual-verbal preferences in an adaptive web-based educational system (AWBES). Students in this trial were assessed by the Felder-Solomon Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS) instrument, and their preferences were used as a means of content personalisation.Contrary to previous findings by other researchers, we found no significant differences in performance between matched and mismatched students. Conclusions are drawn about the value and validity of using cognitive styles as a way of modelling user preferences in educational web applications.

Electronic document addressing: dealing with change

The management of electronic document collections is fundamentally different from the management of paper documents. The ephemeral nature of some electronic documents means that the document address (i.e., reference details of the document) can become incorrect some time after coming into use, resulting in references, such as index entries and hypertext links, failing to correctly address the document they describe. A classic case of invalidated references is on the World Wide Web—links that point to a named resource fail when the domain name, file name, or any other aspect of the addressed resource is changed, resulting in the well-known Error 404. Additionally, there are other errors which arise from changes to document collections.nThis paper surveys the strategies used both in World Wide Web software and other hypertext systems for managing the integrity of references and hence the integrity of links. Some strategies are preventative, not permitting errors to occur; others are corrective, discovering references errors and sometimes attempting to correct them; while the last strategy is adaptive, because references are calculated on a just-in-time basis, according the current state of the document collection.

Interoperability between AEH user models

Creating a good quality Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) system involves a great expenditure of time, effort and money, especially to author the materials in order to implement adaptivity. Moreover, authoring AEH systems is as hard as maintaining them. Furthermore, with the new advances in AEH development, the authored content in a given system can become outdated very rapidly. When the massive overhead in authoring is combined with the possibility of the current AEH system becoming unavailable due to lack of maintenance, providing interoperability of adaptive systems becomes necessary. This paper describes our research on providing interoperability of user models between different AEH systems via a one-to-one conversion between two AEH systems, MOT and WHURLE. Here, we identify the differences and commonalities and address how these influence the efficiency of the conversion of the two systems user models. Although this conversion is done via simple peer-to-peer interaction, it can be easily extended to make use of semantic web technologies, as for example RDF or XML conversion formats, or web services for user model exchange. Therefore, we consider that our work on feature extractions sets the basis for such conversions for the Web and Semantic Web.

Goal oriented personalisation with SCORM

This paper presents an innovative approach to personalize on-line content to the needs of individual learners. We use a regular educational environment, the blackboard learning management system, with a new approach: we add adaptivity and personalization to it by means of authoring the goal-oriented material in an adaptive hypermedia authoring system, MOT, and delivering it in blackboard via a conversion to the SCORM specification. This represents the first attempt to connect adaptive hypermedia and learning management systems.

What was the question? Reconciling open hypermedia and World Wide Web research

This paper considers some of the issues surrounding the relationship between open hypermedia systems research and World Wide Web research. Both areas claim to address advanced hypermedia systems issues, but do so in quite different ways. Although there has been some cooperation between members of these fields, there is significant room for improvement. With both fields using much different approaches in what is ostensibly the same area, researchers often feel more need to justify their approach over others instead of looking for ways to synthesize their results. In this paper, we consider two “extremist” positions that caricature/characterize points of view held by some members of these fields, allowing each field to “make its case” as the “true” home of hypermedia systems research. We then reconcile these radically different perspectives, and in doing so, propose a framework that makes more apparent the contributions of each field and that we feel forms a basis for more fruitful cooperation.

Some hypermedia ideas for the WWW

World Wide Web (WWW) authors must cope in a hypermedia environment analogous to second-generation computing languages, building and managing all hypermedia links using simple anchors and single-step navigation. We present a set of third- and fourth-generation hypermedia functionalities, which WWW developers should consider. We ground our discussion in the hypermedia research literature, and illustrate both from existing implementations and a running scenario. We also give some direction for implementing these on the WWW.

Co-active intelligence for image retrieval

Lexical ambiguity in query-based image retrieval is an immemorial problem which has seemingly resisted all countermeasures. In this paper we introduce a methodology that expresses the users of a system and their navigational behaviour as the paramount resource for resolving query term ambiguity. Mass user consensus is modelled within a multi-dimensional feature space and evaluated through cluster analysis. This technique resolves query term ambiguity in a wholly democratic and dynamic fashion, in contrast to the brittle centralised models of contemporary word sense classification systems. The simple approach contained herein leads to several interesting emergent properties.

Hypertext in the Web — a history

In this short paper, we briefly overview the history of hypertext in the World Wide Web. The Web started with hypertext functions that have disappeared from the early popular browsers, and some are still not present in todays dominant browsers. The hypertext community has proposed ways to bring more sophisticated hypertext into the Web, and the new XML proposals are making many of these into mainstream functions.

The Hybrid Model for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia

Web-based distance learning is becoming increasingly prevalent as the Internet permeates every aspect of our culture, and many educational content management systems are now in use on the web. However, learners experiences of these systems are almost invariably static, with information being delivered regardless of their background or knowledge. Due to variation between learners, it is suggested that these web-based distance-learning systems would benefit from the capability of adapting their content to meet individual needs. To effectively implement this adaptation of educational material, we require a user model that supplies the system with information about the learners using the system, such as their backgrounds, knowledge, interests and learning styles. This paper focuses on presenting a user model that combines the advantages of two techniques (overlay and stereotyping) in a way that provides the system with the ability to deliver information that is fully informed by the requirements of individual users.