Hypertext Writing and Document Reuse: The Role of a Semantic Net

When document components are classified and then recombined during document reuse, a semantic net may serve as the classification language. A theory of analogical inheritance, applied to this semantic net, guides the reorganization of document components. Authors index paragraphs from various sources with node-link-node triples from a semantic net and then use programs to traverse the semantic net and generate various outlines. The program examines node and link names in deciding which path to take. This paper describes how these techniques helped the author to reuse parts of an existing book to write a new one.