Papers in PDF format

“The machine that would perform these seven operations would be a veritable mechanical and collective
brain”[Otlet 34]. “An active community will be constantly involved in discussion concerning the contents of its
manual”(Engelbart). These two quotations put the accent on the last distinctive characteristic of the concept of
hypertext, namely the cooperative work that puts the creation of personalised links and commentaries within
the social construction of knowledge. Due the fact that a hypertext is adaptable and shareable, this approach
means that it is never a final product but remains, for its users, an area of expression and memory that is
constantly evolving. The hypertext therefore takes the form of a flexible tool of social communication, at the
service of collective intelligence processes [Lévy 90]. Thus it becomes possible for each user to have access to
all of the knowledge acquired by the community. At the time of his writing, Bush could already imagine a new
profession of trail blazer who would be the type of experts capable of discovering and building useful routes
within these documents.
It is certainly this characteristic that illustrates the most the difference between the Web and the first
aspirations of the concept of hypertext. Due to the fact that the Web is organised according to a client-server
architecture, each author is only in charge of a limited number of documents, of which the author has sole
rights to define the links to other documents. In other terms, the documents that have not been created by the
author are consultable but communication itself does not exist, since it is not possible for the user to adjust and
transform them. In this case, it consists more of an interconnection of distributed knowledge : each user puts
his knowledge at the disposal of the collective and knows that he can access, by return, all the information that
he requires but does not have in his possession [Nanard 95]. “I offer to others my microcosm of documents”
has substituted the original idea of “Let’s share the universe of documents that we transform together ”.
Presentation of ‘Nestor’
It is possible to rename technical specifications as documents that define the characteristics of a product or
service. These specifications have to comply to certain recommendations (or standards), namely a set of rules
that are normally created by international organisations of standardisation. This section describes how as such
recommendations have been treated with respect to ‘Nestor’, a hypertext prototype that has been developped for
CNET at Lannion.
Characteristics of Corpus and Objectives
For the personnel who have to write specifications, the corpus of recommendations can look like an
encyclopedia. Indeed, these reference documents give, in the form of english text, information concerning,
amongst other things, definitions, concepts, and examples. The recommendations form a “microcosm” of
interdependant documents and are structured in the form of traditional linear texts, namely with a contents
page, and a set of successive paragraphs, grouped in chapters. Containing multiple internal and external
references, specifically to other documents, the consultation of these ‘spaghetti documents’ is based as much
upon a mechanism of the association of ideas as it is upon a sequential and chronological reading.
The aim of ‘Nestor’ is to transform the set of recommandations into a hypertext for the Web. It is worthwhile
asking if this transformation is opportune, because, as stated by [Nielsen 90], “just as the best films are not
made by putting a camera in the front row of a theater, the best hypertexts are not made from text that was
originally written for the linear medium”. In response to this objection it is possible to put forward, in our case,
the following two arguments :