Incorporating computational semantics into emergent hypermedia structures

A semantic net-based hypermedia approach to handling the semantics and behaviour of hypermedia structures emerging in a cooperative environment is presented. The semantic net-based hypermedia structures are visualised and manipulated in cooperative hypermedia browsers. Such hypermedia can be used to capture domain-specific information structures. Application-specific behaviour can be incorporated and adapted when domain-specific knowledge structures emerge and their expected behaviour becomes clearer. This approach can be realised with an object-oriented technology, which uses a combination of classes, prototypes and scripts as modelling constructs. This approach has been successfully applied to creating shared knowledge structures in several application domains. As the knowledge representation framework underlying the semantic web is also a kind of semantic net, the approach described in this work is also applicable to semantic web-based applications that need not only generic reasoning mechanisms but also application-specific computational support.