17.4 Preprocessing

In the preprocessing phase the index and the CYBERMAP structure are generated so that the map can be updated at runtime as fast as possible. If the user adds or deletes nodes in the original document the preprocessing step has to be repeated. The reason for the introduction of the preprocessing phase is twofold:

Tailoring:

Often the preprocessing phase is done by somebody who is more knowledgeable than the final reader of the document. By introducing a preprocessing phase, the knowledgeable user is able to tune the runtime generation of the overview map. To get an optimal overview map the user can modify additional parameters and add knowledge about the internal structure of the document.

Performance:

Theoretically, it would be possible to dispense with the preprocessing phase, but in this prototype the updates would become unacceptably slow.

Ideally a final production version will do away with the preprocessing phase and will allow us to apply CYBERMAP directly to the original document. But for the sake of a satisfactory runtime performance, it is impossible to dispense with preprocessing in our prototype implementations.