Cross-Media Document Linking and Navigation

Abstract

Documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. However, due to a multitude of proprietary document formats with rather simple link models, today's possibilities for creating hyperlinks between snippets of information in different document formats are limited. In previous work, we have presented a dynamically extensible cross-document link service overcoming the limitations of the simple link models supported by most existing document formats. Based on a plug-in mechanism, our link service enables the linking across different document types. In this paper, we assess the extensibility of our link service by integrating some document formats as well as third-party document viewers. We illustrate the flexibility of creating advanced hyperlinks across these document formats and viewers that cannot be realised with existing linking solutions or link models of existing document formats. A user study further investigates the user experience when creating and navigating cross-document hyperlinks. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → User studies; User centered design; • Applied computing → Hypertext / hypermedia creation; Document management;

The ubiquitous digital file: A review of file management research

“…In addition to aiding users in understanding shared files, increased file metadata has been used to try to improve the usefulness of files and their retrieval. So far, this has been done manually, by allowing users to link their files to web resources (Tayeh, Ebrahimi, & Signer, 2018) and assign annotations and images to their folders (Jones, Hou, Sethanandha, Bi, & Gemmell, 2010;Jones, Thorsteinson, et al, 2016), and automatically, by enriching files and folders with content taken from a relevant web source (He, Li, & Shen, 2013;Voida & Greenberg, 2009), or reading file contents to assign them representative icons (Roy, Singh, Chawla, Saxena, & Sinha, 2017). Finally, small but ubiquitous FM actions have not been overlooked, as augmentations have aimed to: make filing new files easier by suggesting locations (Prinz & Zaman, 2005;Sinha & Basu, 2012b), improve file copying tasks by adding a many-to-one feature (Sinha & Basu, 2012c), make moving sensitive files to external destinations more, secure alerting users if the files have remained in the original location (that is, if files have been copied rather than moved; Ishizawa, Andoh, & Nishida, 2010), facilitate planned backups (Cox, Murray, & Noble, 2002), increase the likelihood of retrieving cloud files by prompting users to store them in folders , and allow multiple selection of files across simultaneously open folders (Sinha & Basu, 2012a).…”

“…In addition to aiding users in understanding shared files, increased file metadata has been used to try to improve the usefulness of files and their retrieval. So far, this has been done manually, by allowing users to link their files to Web resources (Tayeh, Ebrahimi, & Signer, 2018) and assign annotations and images to their folders (W. Jones, Hou, Sethanandha, Bi, & Gemmell, 2010;W. Jones, Thorsteinson, et al, 2016), and automatically, by enriching files and folders with content taken from a relevant Web source (He, Li, & Shen, 2013;S.…”

Back to the Future: Bringing Original Hypermedia and Cross-Media Concepts to Modern Desktop Environments

“…Cross-Media Link Browser. The cross-media link browser [21] illustrates the flexibility of the RSL-based link service in terms of the integration of new document formats as well as third-party document viewers. It further highlights the possibility of creating advanced hyperlinks across heterogeneous document formats and viewers that cannot easily be realised with existing linking solutions or the link models of existing document formats.…”

Enhanced Document Retrieval and Discovery Based on a Combination of Implicit and Explicit Document Relationships

“…In contrast to some previous research that only used document metadata to discover the implicit links between documents [10], we are employing both a document's content and metadata in order to discover implicit links based on a clustering algorithm. Moreover, we make use of explicit document links that have been created by users of the crossdocument link service [12][13][14]. It is worth mentioning that we also exploited a document's content and metadata to support important features such as synonym-based search and word stems.…”

“…In addition, our solution exploits explicit links (i.e. bidirectional hyperlinks) that are defined between documents based on an existing link service [12][13][14].…”