🚀 go-pugleaf

         KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING AND HYPERMEDIA USABILITY
                                
                          Mark Chignell
        Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
                University of Southern California


                     Monday, 11 September 89
                            3:00 p.m.
               Room 3202, Sanford Fleming Building
                     10 King's College Road
                      University of Toronto

Hypermedia uses associative structuring of nodes and links to represent and
provide access to large amounts of information stored in heterogeneous
media.  Applications of hypermedia range from decision support and
computer-based training to cooperative authoring of text and intelligent
databases.  The issue of hypermedia usability will be discussed from a human
factors perspective and recent empirical findings will be reviewed.  The
relationship between information retrieval and hypermedia browsing will be
clarified and 10 dimensions of hypermedia usability will be identified.  The
role of knowledge engineering methods in enhancing hypermedia usability will
then be discussed.  A distinction will be made between enhancing usability
through better authoring (creating better structure) and enhancing usability
through browse tools (allowing the user to visualize the structure).
Traditional models of manual authoring of links to increase usability will
be contrasted with inferential link construction using syntactic and
semantic heuristics.  It is proposed that network analysis techniques may
provide predictive measures of hypeanalyses of performance and syntactic and
semantic knowledge in developing usable hypermedia structures and browse
tools.