Information Structuring for Intelligent Hypermedia: A Knowledge Engineering Approach

The next generation of hypermedia systems will undoubtedly incorporate many concepts and techniques taken from the field of artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems, in order to add more intelligence to the basic hypertext model. In this paper, we discuss where this need for more intelligent hypermedia systems comes from, by looking at the major authoring and reading problems characteristic of hypermedia. We then point out the similarity in system architecture which exists between expert systems and intelligent hypermedia systems, and discuss how a knowledge engineering approach to hypermedia information structuring can help us address these authoring and reading problems. Finally, we describe the use of such an approach in our implementation of IKON, a prototype third-order hypermedia system, based on the so-called Model-Map-View-Praxis or MMVP conceptual system architecture