The Seven Design Concepts for Navigation in Cyberspace

Abstract

The general problem addressed in this and the following eight chapters is how hypermedia documents should be structured and what navigation mechanisms should be provided such that readers can orient themselves in large information spaces. These large information spaces can consist of free-text articles, structured databases, hypertext documents, or knowledge bases. The orientation and information exploration problem can easily be experienced by anybody browsing on the Web: How often in a browsing session did the reader inadvertently stumble on an interesting site, only to search desperately for the same site in the next session? Also called the problem of being lost in hyper-space, this question has met high attention in the hypertext community, and many different solutions have been proposed.

We commonly mistake data for information. Information starts with data, but data is not information—it is a source of information.

—Ramesh Jain, 1995

[Jai 95]