Multi-Perspective Information Projection: Structuring Hypermedia Information in Engineering Development Projects

摘要

Distributed enterprises are now collaborating closely withrntheir suppliers and partners worldwide while continuouslyrnimproving their response time to global markets. Suchrndistributed enterprises demand greater levels of support forrninformation sharing and collaborative workspaces amongrnengineering development teams. While the use of Intranets forrngathering and sharing information is expanding, the organizationrnof the shared information is usually ad-hoc and is not designedrnto efficiently serve the diverse information needs of workgroups.rnSuch ad-hoc organizations of information resultrninformation overload and hence information users have to resortrnto (syntactic) keyword search to access information. This paperrnproposes an Information Projection methodology that integratesrnthe organization of the semantic content of shared informationrnwith the organization of syntactic content of documents in a wayrnthat is meaningful to specific work-groups so as to reducerninformation overload. The Information Projection methodologyrnhas been applied in three different engineering contexts to variedrndegrees of sophistication and has shown a significant degree ofrnre-usability, although the information and document models thatrnresult are themselves very context specific. The informationrnmaps resulting from the context of a MEMS technologyrndevelopment project have also been implemented using basicrnWeb technology (HTML, CGI scripts) and has provided severalrninsights on the implications and limitations of suchrnimplementations.