The Design and Evaluation of Industrial Hypermedia.
By
Gary Brian Wills BEng (Hons) MIQA AMIEE
A Thesis Presented for Transfer from MPhil to PhD in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, March 1999
2. Industrial Information Environments.
3. Design Process for Hypermedia Applications.
5. Conclusions and Future work.
Designing an industrial hypermedia application can be extremely difficult and complex due to the large volume of information.
The aim of this programme is therefore to develop enhanced design and authoring methodologies, while addressing the issues faced by an enterprise when developing a large-scale industrial hypermedia application.
The main design methodologies currently discussed in the literature assume that the authors of a hypermedia application have complete control over the content of the information space. In addition, no one model covers all the requirements for developing an industrial hypermedia application.
The design methodology presented satisfies the requirements found in the industrial environment in a holistic approach. That is, it takes into account the information structures and constraints that exist within the industrial environment, and the background of the people who will have to design and implement the industrial hypermedia system.
While the general authoring methodologies address some of the requirements of an industrial environment, the size and complexity of the required system, aggravates some of the problems found in general hypermedia authoring. Hence, an authoring methodology is presented that addresses these issues in relation to the industrial environment.
The methodologies have been used to produce a prototype application. This will be used to evaluate the usability of a hypermedia system within the factory environment.
The author acknowledges Dr Richard M Crowder, for his support and guidance while developing the material presented in this thesis.
The author thanks the other members of the FIRM team, Professor Wendy Hall and Dr Ian Heath for all their assistance in the last 3 years while working on the project.
The author acknowledges all the members of the Multimedia Research Group and Electrical Engineering who have listened and commented on the ideas as they have evolved.
In addition, the author thanks Geraldine Price and Hazel Spencer, from the dyslexia clinic, for their help and advice in written English.