13. Cybertools - Overview
The next eight chapters present our own tools and mechanisms for navigation and visualization of information structures. These tools represent the result of six years of work in this area done mostly at MIT and Dartmouth College, experimenting with tools and methods for navigation in cyberspace, but also testing those tools and concepts by building some large-scale hypermedia documents: We have implemented a hypermedia version of a Computer Science textbook "Introduction to Algorithms"[Cor90] as well as a series of hypermedia conference proceedings. Both of these systems are described later in the book.
The issues raised in the previous chapters have been addressed in our own work in different ways:
Hierarchy--We have built a hypertext engine called the "Gloor/Dynes hypertext engine" that is based on hierarchical navigation. This engine is particularly well suited for educational material as well as conversions of textbooks, as these are generally hierarchically structured.
Sequentialization--The Gloor/Dynes hypertext engine contains among other tools also a Path Editor that allows to easily and flexibly construct paths and guided tours. We are currently in the process of porting the Path Editor to the World Wide Web.
Similarity--The CYBERMAP system computes similarities between hypertext nodes based on the vector space model introduced in chapter 1. This structure is then visualized by clustering the nodes into so-called hyperdrawers. The hyperdrawers are displayed graphically based on similarity between hyperdrawers.
Mapping--Our tools CYBERMAP and Hiermap make heavy use of the mapping concepts described in chapter 11 to visualize the semantic information structure (CYBERMAP) and the hierarchical document structure (Hiermap).
The rest of the introductory chapter on cybertools gives an overview of the capabilities of the Gloor/Dynes hypertext engine.