Rethinking Web Design Models: Requirements for Addressing the Content

Description/Abstract

The objective of hypermedia design models is to produce a well-organised web site. The organisation is undertaken at the level of a particular building-block – an abstract data unit which may match a frame, paragraph or region on a Web page. The increasing sophistication of these models allows the designer to deal with interaction and personalisation, but precludes one of the basic features of hypertext – the text itself. This paper argues that this oversight remains a fundamental problem because the component of content production for many web sites is not an abstract data unit but the concepts embedded in the paragraphs, sentences and words of the content regions. Consequently there is a gap between the organisation of material and the origination of material that is not well-addressed by current design methods. The paper considers the problem of concept modelling in the Semantic Web, its implementation in various hypertext environments and whether this approach can inform the current generation of hypermedia design models.