V.T Thuy

Delivering materials engineering information using hypermedia systems

The availability of reliable and detailed information on the properties, behavior, and characteristics of materials is of crucial importance to engineers during materials engineering processes, that is, designing, manufacturing, installing, and maintaining industrial components and installations. The challenges facing computerized information tools that must provide effective support for these materials engineering processes are threefold: to develop materials information systems for use by engineers that allows structured, standardized access to diverse, highly interconnected information on materials. In this paper, we discuss how the use of hypermedia tools and techniques allows us to address these three challenges. We contend that the rich diversity and interconnectedness of materials information can only be adequately captured using the hypermedia data model. We also discuss how, using the interface functionals of a hypermedia tool, we can tailor the interface of a materials information system to the task-related needs of the corrosion engineer. We illustrate this by examining two hypermedia materials information systems that have been developed in cooperation with our research group: the Active Library® on Corrosion (ALC) and CONNAISSANCE. The ALC is a CD-ROM based hypermedia system with a large but fixed collection of corrosion engineering information that can be consulted on the engineers personal computer. CONNAISSANCE is a unique hypertext system with continuously updated materials engineering information that can be accessed and consulted on-line.