The open hypermedia approach to information organisation

The dream of universal speedy access to information through electronic means has resulted in a new set of problems. Vast amounts of information may arrive at the workstation via electronic mail and pointers to further information may arrive in the form of URLs and ftp addresses, while, paradoxically, paper based information continues to arrive in undiminished flow. Time constraints dictate that only the most important items in this ever broader stream of information will receive the attention they deserve: the rest will merely be scanned to determine whether they may be useful at same later time. The thesis of this paper is that the problems caused by information overload may be eased by storing incoming data in such a way that it may be accessed later using the services of an open hypermedia system. Such systems provide multiple methods of access to information that map well on to the cognitive models of their information spaces that users build. We illustrate these techniques by reference to Microcosm (Davis et al., 1992), an example of the new generation of open hypermedia systems, and now commercially available