Toward hypermedia support for information relationship management

The overall research goal of this project is to provide hypermedia functionality to information systems (ISs) not enhanced with hypermedia with minimal or no changes to the ISs. ISs dynamically generate their contents and thus require some mapping mechanism to automatically map the generated contents to hypermedia constructs (nodes, links and link markers) instead of hypermedia links being hardcoded over static contents. No systematic approach exists, however, for identifying information relationships and building mapping rules to infer useful links that give users direct access to the ISs’ primary functionality, give access to meta-information about IS objects, give access to relationships among information objects and enable annotation and ad hoc (user-declared) linking. This paper contributes a procedure for analyzing ISs and building mapping rules that supplement ISs with hypermedia support, which results in new ways to view and manage the IS’s knowledge and information relationships.