Authoring a Large Scale Industrial Hypermedia Application: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper describes the creation and development of a large-scale industrial application using the open hypermedia system, Microcosm [Davies 92]. Microcosm allows the user to construct a hypermedia database of documents, and re-uses that data for a range of applications. This is achieved by storing the links in separate linkbases, which are then overlaid on the data when the user recalls a file. No markup is therefore imposed on the data. This project highlights the ways in which such an approach can be used to reduce authoring effort and to facilitate future modification and maintenance of the resource base. We have also experimented with the automatic generation of links and in creating different link databases to provide different views on a common set of data.