Hypertext and Hypermedia in the law

• Autore: Rosa Di Giorgio, Roberta Nannucci
• Pagine: 07-12

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Hypertext and Hypermedia in the law

The journal Informatics e Diritto dedicated the second number of 1994 (2/94) to a special Issue on hypertext and hypermedia technology in the law. Due to the large number of contributions received from Italian and foreign scholars and practitioners, a part of this issue (1/95) is devoted to the same topics and organized according to the way they were presented in the earlier issue. Contributions by Garzotto, Mainetti and Paolini, by Heather and Rossiter and by Kilov appear in the section Hypertext and Hypermedia -Technologies: Theoretical Aspects. Instead, the articles by Blaquier Ascano Di Giorgi, Hernandez Forte and Nannucci, by Mercatali, by Valle and Montini and, finally, by Leante can be found in the section headed Semantic Models and Knowledge Representation in Legal Hypertext and Hypermedia Systems.

Dealing with hypermedia documents implies a series of difficulties connected with the non linear organization of the material and the need to control the explosion of links and manage the consistency of different kinds of media. Garzotto, Mainetti and Paolini face this problem by recognizing that there are no definite rules for the design of a hypermedia system. In the article, they analyze the design process of a hypermedia system and propose its organization in four different (but interdependent) tasks: content analysis, structure design, dynamic design and lay-out design. According to the authors, each of these tasks focuses on different aspects of hypermedia application and requires different methods, description terminology and expertise. They propose a set of primitives that can be useful for describing the output of the design process and are based on a well-known design model, called HDM, that allows the design team to describe the output of the design process and to specify precisely the application they wish to realize. Developing a safe methodology allows the designers ccto focus on the rationale of the application to be developed and to take decisions at the proper level abstracting as much as possible from implementation requirements. Starting off from an analysis of the Page 8 contents of the system in order to define user requirements, a real organization of the system and a specification of structure types are reached at two levels, in the small (nodes and slots) and in the large (collections and webs). The subsequent phase is navigation within the hypermedia system, the dynamic design: in the large, that refers to the way the user can move around across the different pieces of information (i.e. link traversing, Data Base Queries, and Content-based Search) and dynamic in-the-small, that refers to the interaction of the user with single slots within nodes (i.e., hiding a slot, moving a slot in the screen, opening a hidden slot, or playing control over video, sound or animation, etc.). The proposed methodology is not only useful when analyzing and designing new systems, but is also aimed at describing, analyzing and evaluating already developed systems, so that discussion is usefully stimulated amongst researchers and users. The application described here, entitled click, was developed on the basis of this model and refers to...