A SEMANTIC DATABASE APPROACH TO KNOWLEDGE-BASED HYPERMEDIA SYSTEMS

This paper discusses an architecture for knowledge-based hypermedia systems based on work from semantic databases. Its power derives from its use of a single, uniform data structure which can be used to store both the intensional and extensional information needed to generate hypermedia systems. The architecture is also sufficiently powerful to accommodate the representation of reasonable amounts of knowledge within a hypermedia system. Work has been conducted in building a number of prototypes on a small information base of digital image data. The prototypes serve as demonstrators of systems for managing the large amounts of information held by museums on their artefacts. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the flexibility of the architecture in serving the needs of a number of distinct user groups. To this end, the first prototype has demonstrated that the virtual architecture is capable of supporting some of the main hypermedia access methods. The current demonstrator is being used to investigate the potential of the approach for handling multiple classifications of hypermedia material. The research is particularly directed at the incorporation of evolving temporal and spatial knowledge.