Browsing, Building, and Beholding Cyberspace: New Approaches to the Navigation, Construction, and Visualisation of Hypermedia on the Internet

The Internet and the World Wide Web form a vast, global information network. This thesis describes new approaches to the navigation, construction, and visualisation of hypermedia on the Internet, as embodied in the Harmony client and authoring tool for the Hyper-G web server. Harmony’s advanced browsing and navigational tools support the concept of location feedback , which helps users orient by providing contextual feedback with reference to an explicit structural framework. Harmony’s suite of (remote) authoring facilities includes structure editing, document editing, interactive graphical link editing in all media, attribute editing, interactive uploading, insertion, and deletion, making annotations, and managing user accounts and user groups. The Harmony 3D Scene Viewer was the first Internet-enabled, 3d hypermedia browser. Its successor, VRweb, is a popular VRML browser with support for collision detection, terrain-following, point-of-interest navigation, and interactive link editing. Finally, Harmony incorporates two innovative information visualisation tools. The Harmony Local Map is a dynamic, two-dimensional structure map which visualises link and membership relationships. The Harmony Information Landscape is a three-dimensional landscape visualisation, which utilises the three available dimensions to compactly present a combineddisplay of both hierarchical structure and hyperlink relationships.