Taxonomic Distance - Classification and Navigation

Hypermedia museum exhibits will often be indexed acording to different criteria. This paper discusses an approach to hypermedia design for museum applications that attempts to capture underlying semantic relationships between conceptual terms in a separate index space. A distance measure over the index space makes possible high level navigation tools to assist users unfamiliar with the organisation of the information. This semantic closeness fbncti on allows flexible information requests with non-exact matches of terms. A prototype implementation of a social history exhibit is described, where information is indexed by temporal, spatial and subject-based terms. The spatial and temporal dimensions are inter-linked. The paper describes navigation tools intended to allow easier public access, and discusses how they might be extended drawing on work in numerical taxonomy.