Automatic Structuring of Embedded Hypermedia Documents

Embedded hypermedia documents (HDs) are becoming more common in aircraft cockpits, powerand industrial-plant control panels, and other user interfaces to complex systems. These hypermedia documents are often large and heavily cross referenced, yet they must support extremely e cient and intuitive user navigation. Designing such documents well is di cult. In this paper, we describe a computer-based approach to structuring HDs. We show how an interface designer can quantify ease of navigation in a way that makes the HD-structuring problem equivalent to a version of the well-known optimization problem of graph partitioning. This reduction to graph partitioning is the basis for an implemented system that uses known graph-partitioning heuristics to structure HDs automatically.