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Introduction
Computer Aided Information Navigation: Project Description
David Ribeiro Lamas*
Jennifer Jerrams-Smith
*Department of Computing, DEC
Bournemouth University, England
{dlamas, jj-smith}@bournemouth.ac.uk
Feliz Ribeiro Gouveia
*Multimedia Resource Center
Universidade Fernando Pessoa
Portugal
fribeiro@ufp.pt
The Computer Aided Information Navigation (CAIN) project is proposed as a system that maximises
information navigation quality on very large hypertext databases, such as the World Wide Web, without
interfering with them. Maximising information navigation quality means to reach the desired information
faster and more accurately trying to avoid common hypertext’s user problems such as information and memory
overload or disorientation. This will be accomplished by creating a local and collaborative environment which
will act as an interface between users and the data infrastructure. This environment will be responsible by
maintaining meta-information about the referred infrastructure as well as by maintaining information on users
models and preferences and to use that same information to direct and optimise users’ interaction with the
system. As a way of describing the system without any ambiguity, Z was adopted as the formal notation for
specifying the several system components. No operations will be described because World Wide Web creation
and authoring are far away from this projects’ aims and scope.
General architecture
At a general level the whole system architecture is decomposed into three layers. The data infrastructure –
Level 0, in this prototype, will be the World Wide Web with its HTML pages and page embedded links. The
information layer – Level 1 – is an automatically generated and tagged node and link database which represents
the users known world. The basic purpose of this layer is to enable some sort of local hypertext manipulation
and, eventually, visualisation of the known hypertext network. This automatically recorded database will also
work as an enhanced navigation history keeper and will enable features as bi-directional navigation to and from
any node on the hypertext network among others. The knowledge layer – Level 2 – is the core of the whole
proposed architecture. At this level information about the nodes and links is stored enabling a generation of a
sort of semantic network whose edges are information layer selected and frame described nodes and whose arcs
are information layer selected and typed [Bloomfield 1994] links. This semantic network will, in some way, be
combined with a user model [Beaumont 1994] database by a guiding agent [Brusilovsky 1995] now named the
Butler. The Butler definition is the real aim of the proposed project.
Level 0’s scope, however, is limited to the actual HTML pages and the related links. Within the pages
themselves every link will be dealt with be it a link to another page, a link to a specific position on another
page or a link to other parts of the current page. For a formal definition of the subset of the data infrastructure
elements addressed by this prototype’s architecture a Z definition will be provided. One set is assumed, [URL]. It