Providing Maps to Support the Early Stage of Design in Hypermedia Systems

Designing hypermedia systems might be a complex task as soon as the number of chunks of information to organize is large. In the task of designing hypermedia systems, interactive dynamic maps can provide designers with a better understanding of the semantics of the underlying set of documents, thus providing assistance in the design process. In this paper we present topic maps and techniques for computing these maps directly from a collection of documents. The major contributions of this work include 1) automatic techniques for extracting the semantic contents of a collection of documents, 2) automatic linking strategies, 3) output strategies to provide abstract graphical views on the semantic contents, 4) the ability to use the maps themselves as documents that can be manipulated, stored in a library and shared among designers.