Using Hyperdocuments For Knowledge Management
Hyperdocument technology provides the power to develop organized and compressed knowledge-bases, thereby improving the speed and accuracy with which data, information, and knowledge are managed. Anyone who has accessed the World Wide Web has been exposed to hyperdocuments - a highly nonlinear and interactive mixture of text, graphics, images, video, and audio. Abstractly, a hyperdocument consists of a network of pages (organized collections of information that are each internally self-contained and independently understandable) connected by links (an electronic cross-reference used to connect logically related chunks). Links simulate the mental association between pages in the mind of the author.
Knowledge structuring is a fundamental process in knowledge management. Structuring knowledge means assimilating research results into an organized body of knowledge (Schmoldt and Rauscher 1994). This activity demands creative synthesis and results in a significant compaction of information. However, in most natural language text documents used today, the structure of the subject is more or less hidden, camouflaged by the sequential nature of the medium and the need to gracefully and carefully transition from one idea to the next so the reader can understand the authors meaning. In contrast to natural language text documents, hypertext forces the author to explicitly highlight the structure (outline or concept map) first and foremost for the user. Only secondarily, is the user exposed to the content matter. Hypertext has many other advantages that make it well suited for creating and publishing most types of documents, including its can be easily accessed, it occupies little physical space, it can be published cheaply and rapidly. And, unlike linear print media that is static and assumes a single, fixed skill level by the intended audience, hyperdocuments can be easily updated and manipulated to fit a variety of users.
