Papers in PDF format

• From a practical point of view, it would be laborious to restructure these texts. The people responsible for
documenting the Ariane space project state, “A rocket produces its own weight in paper”. Within the
domain of telecommunications, documentation is both voluminous and complex.
• From a methodological point of view, this transformation seems to be justified, since it is based upon the
conviction that each document adds value to others, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
[Glushko 89].
Due to the fact that ‘Nestor’ is a hypertext prototype, it should logically display the characteristics that have
been already stated for the gift of ubiquity, the omnipotence, and the omniscience. These terms were
voluntarily emphatic in order to emphasize the quasi-divine character of the concept of hypertext, to enable it
to be initially defined. In our case, it concerns recalling the last two founding principles, which happen to be
the most commonplace terminology, of easy creation of personalised links and team work.
Nodes and Typology of Links
The hypertexts have to, as their first task, articulate and organise the entities of information (nodes), by use of
relations (links) that exist between these grains of knowledge. These links are activated by the user in order to
travel elsewhere, according to his interests.
Within ‘Nestor’, the nodes represent the formal and logical divisions that can be found in reference documents,
specifically, the contents page, the chapters and optionally the appendices. Coming from this ‘natural’ division
of the units of meaning, it is possible to define the following links :
• ‘Zoom’links (or focalisation links) : these join the contents to chapters.
• Plan links : links between chapters and the corresponding contents (these are the inverse of ‘zoom’ links).
• Succession links : links used for linear reading, as in the case of a document (this is the notion of
following chapter).
• Precedence links : inverse of succession links (this is the notion of previous chapter).
• Reference links : these join a word (or a group of words) of a chapter to either a contents page or to
another chapter. The references can be external and internal. They are usually preceded by an expression
such as “cf.”, “see”, “for example” etc.
These links, that could be renamed as structural links due to the fact that they are directly derived from logical
organisation of linear texts, can therefore be automatically identified and generated by a compiler. In additon to
these objective links, there are subjective links [Kahn 89] that are reference links created by the users in order
to enrich the initial connectivity of the hypertext. This category of personalised link is important for hypertexts
as it gives the possibility of adding links that transform, in a certain way, each reader into a potential author.
Thus the user can, in concrete terms, structure and build his own knowledge. Indeed, as time progresses, the
user, by interacting with the hypertext, acquires an understanding of the domain under exploration
[Yankelovich 87]. The hypertext therefore becomes, for the user, a depositary of expertise, a way to organise
his knowledge by correcting and completing, through the creation of personalised links, the incoherencies and
deficiencies of initial texts. It should be noted that, in our case, only the addition of links can be performed,
since the number of nodes is, by definition, constant as it is determined by a finalised set of documents.
Therefore, it is possible to say that, in the first instance, the user appropriates the knowledge of texts through
the use of structural links. It is only later that he reappropriates this knowledge through the use of personalised
links. In order to explain the semantics associated with a personalised link, the user can add ‘commentary’
details to augment the anchor and the node of destination. Due to the fact that the ‘commentary’ and
‘destination’ details are optional, the personalised links found within ‘Nestor’ can be classified as one of the
following three types :
Destination Commentary
Direct links (DL) Yes No
Commented links (CL) Yes Yes
Simple commentary (SC) No Yes