Hypermedia production (abstract): hand-craft or witchcraft

Many successful hypermedia systems are hand-crafted; creating and navigating their networks of nodes and links is entirely under user control. In other systems, concern for the economics of manually linking large bodies of existing information, coupled with a desire to promote more responsive and reconfigurable interfaces, has spurred the development of automated tools, intensional or virtual structures, automatic node content generation and automatic link discovery. some claim that, apart from annotation features su&h as commenting, the significant hypermedia systems of the future will be entirely automated. In this panel we explore the potential and dangers of automating hypermedia. Hypermedia automation includes converting documents, mapping applications and navigating hypermedia networks. Converting Documents Different domains call for different types of conversion–traditional letters and reports, electronic mail messages, the messages and reports an expert system produces, etc. Conversion may be invoked by, e.g., importing a document, an electronic mail or EDI message arriving, or a user querying or requesting computation. Converting a single document can result in a single node linked to other nodes–with or without embedded link markers-or could extract an entire hyperme-dia (sub) network of nodes and links. Mapping Application Domains Automated mapping recognizes an application domain's implicit or encoded structure and realizes this in terms of a hypermedia data model. The structure of the resulting hy-permedia representation will depend upon its intended use-to guide navigation, to serve as a user interface to a complex application, or to reveal a new way of organizing and interpreting a collection of materials. The hypermedia system also may use this structure to generate composite objects and net work overviews automatically. Navigating Hypermedia Networks Automation may support the navigation of virtual structures, especially when a mapped hypermedia network dynamically portrays the currently active portion of an external application or data base. Here the hypermedia system often must resolve (and perhaps compute) link destinations on demand. The hy-permedia network can be generated (or tailored) as the result of a query or choosing an application command, e.g., within a CAI system. Automated generation often is touted as an attractive means of maintaining the consistency of the " knowledge " a domain represents. Yet automation incurs the risk of incorrectly identifying and omitting links, thus impoverishing the information they relate.