Toward dialogues with documents: MultiBrowser

Abstract

When several information items are presented simultaneously, the potential exists for users to interact with information in a rich and rewarding way. The MultiBrowser system supports such interaction via an information foraging style of hypermedia browsing. Multiple windows, colored bars that provide visual cues, and automatically inserted hyperlinks among the paragraphs in a document set contribute to the structure of repositories created by MultiBrowser. These repositories are browsable over the Web using an ordinary Web browser.

Implementation and analysis of a direct multidisplay repository

“…The next section proposes a solution, currently implemented in our MultiBrowser system Suppose each paragraph in a repository has six outgoing links, 5 to other paragraphs and 1 to itself. These links might, as in the MultiBrowser system [6], be implemented as a 6-target hyperlink that, when clicked, brings up a 6-window display of all six link targets. Let k be the number of targets to paragraphs in kernel documents.…”