Intermedia: issues, strategies, and tactics in the design of a hypermedia document system

A hypermedia system provides a tool for cooperative work by allowing writers and designers to share a network of linked documents where they can create documents, link their own and others' documents together, and leave notes for one another. This paper discusses issues that designers need to address in the development of hypermedia systems. Major issues involve what kind of linking, contexts, and visual modeling the system provides. The composite of the answers to these issues determines the nature of the hypermedia system and how useful it is to those using it as a tool for cooperative work. The following presents a variety of solutions including those that developers at the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship implemented in the creation of Intermedia.