Introduction of a dynamic assistance to the creative process of adding dimensions to multistructured documents

Abstract

We consider documents as the results of dynamic processes of documentary fragments' associations. We have experienced that once a substantial number of associations exist, users need some synoptic views. One possible way of providing such views relies in the organization of associations into relevant subsets that we call "dimensions". Thus, dimensions offer orders along which a documentary archive can be traversed. Many works have proposed efficient ways of presenting combinations of dimensions through graphical user interfaces. Moreover, there are studies on the structural properties of dimensional hypertexts. However, the problem of the origins and evolution of dimensions has not yet received a similar attention. Thus, we propose a mechanism based on a simple structural constraint for helping users in the construction of dimensions: if a cycle appears within a dimension while a user is creating a new dimension by the aggregation of existing ones, he will be encouraged (and assisted in his task) to restructure the dimensions in order to cut the cycle. This is a first step towards a rational control of the emergence and evolution of dimensions.