A comparison of hyperstructures: zzstructures, mSpaces, and polyarchies

  • Authors:

  • Michael J. McGuffin;m. c. schraefel

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada;University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Hypermedia applications tend to use simple representations for navigation: most commonly, nodes are organized within an unconstrained graph, and users are presented with embedded links or lists of links. Recently, new data structures have emerged which may serve as alternative models for both the organization, and presentation, of hypertextual nodes and links. In this paper, we consider zzstructures, mSpaces, and polyarchies from the perspective of graph theory, and compare these models formally. The novel aspects of this work include: providing a sound, graph-theoretic analysis of zzstructures; the identification of a new class of polyarchies associated with mSpaces; and the comparison and classification of these and other structures within a taxonomy. The taxonomy that results from our comparison allows us to consider, first; what the distinct characteristics of each model are at a fundamental level, and second; what model or attributes of a model may be most appropriate for the design goals of a given hypermedia application.