Csci 6838 User Interface Design Term Project Chimera User Interface Design -final Report

The Chimera User Interface (Chimui) project involved applying a task-centered design methodology to solve the problem of searching and visualizing the complex hypermedia structures of Chimera in a concise, crisp, and easily understandable way. As described on the Chimera homepage, Chimera is "an infrastructure which provides open hypermedia services to client applications." This means that Chimera is a system that allows semantic relationships between different applications or documents to be expressed in the form of connections. These semantic relationships are stored externally to the document and client program in Chimera servers. One major advantage of this approach is that the client programs such as Microsoft Word or Excel do not need to be aware of these relationships, and more importantly, these "links" and "anchors" are not physically written to the document, as they would need to be in other hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. This allows for much more flexibility in the creation and updating of these semantic relationships, the ability to allow the relationships to change due to the context of the end users, and the ability to add more client applications through the use of plug-ins.