Semantic Spaces: A new Access Paradigm to Hypermedia Systems

Abstract

An increasing number of institutions and universities are using hypermedia systems for educational purposes. Unfortunately many of the systems available, with the WWW being a special source of concern, do not support advanced tools for navigation, study and collaboration. In this paper I suggest a new tool, called Semantic Spaces for this purpose and discuss its implementation into the Hyper-G hypermedia system. Following a general discussion on the potential of hypermedia systems for education, section 2 describes some of the the issues that arise of the use of hypermedia systems, especially spatial navigation (section 2.1) and organization of the information gathered while browsing. In section 3 the concept of semantic spaces is introduced as a medium for the organization of a users understanding of the contents of the hypermedia system. The implementation of these ideas using the hypermedia system Hyper-G is discussed in section 4.