The Hypermedia Authoring Research Toolkit (HART)

Abstract

A major obstacle hindering the advancement and commercial acceptance of hypermedia is the cost of converting paper based information into hypermedia form. The Hypermedia Authoring Research Toolkit (HART) was developed to support the human editor during this media-to-hypermedia conversion process. The tool's goal is to help improve the correctness and completeness of the hypermedia database, as well as reduce the media-to-hypermedia conversion cost. We believe it is not possible to properly convert media to hypermedia without the participation of a human editor during the transformation. It is therefore necessary to develop tools to assist the human during this process. By reducing the overhead associated with the physical management of the hyper-database construction, the subject specialist is better able to concentrate on the information content. Support is provided in two basic ways: By providing procedural guidance. From our experience constructing hypermedia systems we have developeds an efficient process for this media-to-hypermedia transformation. By providing intelligent assistance. At each phase in the transformation the system can suggest likely nodes, key phrases, index values, anchors, and links to the editor. The project's research focus is to identify the most effective methodologies to assist the human editor transform linear text, images and video into hypermedia structure.