Hypermedia – The Content Part
4.1 The Content Part
Nodes and Links can be considered as design objects. Properties (semantics) can be associated with these design objects in order to introduce coherence in a hypertext document.
The content part contains design objects that carry information. They are content nodes that contain information and content links that connect content nodes based on semantic relationships. Content nodes can be either atomic or composite in nature. Content links can be typed specifying the exact nature of the semantic relationship. They can be classified into three types:
- Level One: Links with no labels.
- Level Two: Links with labels describing global semantic relationships such as “is discussed by”, “is illustrated by”.
- Level Three: Links with more specific labels such as “is criticized by”, “is shown graphically”.
This classification of links is similar to the more elaborate classification of nodes and links in the hypertext framework developed by Rao and Turoff. According to Thuring et al., the author creating a hypertext document can initially create a Level Two link to show a general relationship between content nodes. As the author becomes more clear about the relationship between two nodes, the link labels can be changed to Level Three. Thus, “the levels of link label hierarchy support a continuous refinement of the links depending on author’s current state of knowledge.” [ Thuring et al., 1991].
While creating the content part, the following design rules can be applied:
- Composite content nodes should be used to hierarchically structure the content of the document into domain specific sub-units of information.
- The label of a link should be as specific as possible and should constitute a comprehensible sentence together with the names of the source and destination nodes.