Issues and Challenges in the Development of Hypermedia Information Systems

Hypermedia is a powerful information management technology that couples the enhanced representative capabilities of multimedia with the power to define ever more meaningful relationships between data. It is only in recent years that hypermedia has been popularised, due in large measure to the surge of the ubiquitous World Wide Web. Of course, not all hypermedia applications are Web-based, nor can all Web-based applications be classified as hypermedia (see Figure 1). Indeed, the Web has many basic architectural flaws and should properly only be regarded as a primitive, low-level, ‘first generation’ hypermedia environment (Bieber & Vitali, 1997). Nevertheless, the Web is the most significant vehicle for hypermedia delivery today, and it has emphatically ushered hypermedia technology into the arena of organisational information systems (Isakowitz, 1993; Lowe & Hall, 1999).