4.1 Information presentation

Figure 4.1: Typical tourist page on a server in Auckland

The presentation of multimedia information is certainly the leading application of hypermedia systems on the Web. As we will argue in Section 4.2 this is likely to change in the future. However, most substantial organizations today are operating a Web server and the majority are just using the Web much like a glossy printed brochure for general information. Universities, university institutes or even individuals explain their programs and areas of expertise; museums try to `whet the appetite for the real thing'; tourist organizations inform about the facilities of a place or a region much as a flyer would do (see for example Figure 4.1); companies present themselves and their products; societies praise their services; etc. As cute as some such presentations may be, they are -- from a wider perspective -- fairly useless. What does it help that most organizations have `some presence' on the Web when the contents, reliability and level of detail differ vastly from organization to organization. You are likely to be disappointed when ever you look for something fairly specific!

Much as the invention of the printing press initially created a flood of pamphlets until publishing and newspaper companies started to concentrate, filter and package information, the Web also has to go from its current `pamphlet' stage through a shakedown to larger, well structured pools of information. Organizations that collect, unify, filter and package information for various tastes will become more and more commonplace and will guarantee a certain level of reliability and uniformity of material offered on the Web.

Till then, the Web will remain hard to use as a general information system. To be concrete, let us mention a few specific examples. It would be nice if the major cities of each country were present on the Web, but if each city were to do its own thing with no coordination, users could get quite frustrated; the information they might find for one city may be there in a completely different form, or not there at all for another. Similarly, information on museums or theaters in a certain region presented on the Web can be extremely useful, particularly if all museums or theaters use the same approach and an index covers a region as large as possible. Descriptions of university departments within a university (or even within a state or country) can be very useful, but only if all departments cooperate and present what they wish to present according to a similar scheme. Airline connections are great to have on the Web: if no coordination between airlines exists such efforts are, however, doubtful. This list can be extended arbitrarily.

The Web today can be compared to a huge library where most books contain only moderately useful information, and books are structured very differently, confusing the reader.

The essence of the above is that all organizations and persons providing information on the Web should try to do so under as large an umbrella with as uniform and consistent a structure as possible. Thus, the concept of combining many small Web servers, at least logically (but not necessarily physically), into a single larger one while retaining a reasonable degree of `local' autonomy is crucial for the success of the Web. This amounts to moving from many individual small servers to one or more larger distributed database of hypermedia servers such as Hyper-G.

The above statements may be surprising for some. The Web has often been seen as the big liberator that makes everyone a publisher. Unfortunately, if everyone publishes something without coordination, the result is not richness of information but a cacophony of data, close to unusable chaos. Far too much time is wasted today -- and this is particularly true of university environments that started the big Web wave, after all -- by individuals doing their own cute stuff on their own little server, a server that probably is down a good portion of the time for whatever reason. Information that is to be available on a seven days a week, 24 hours a day basis has to be served by computers that are run professionally, with appropriate maintenance and back-up procedures.

One other aspect should not be overlooked: Web servers are often seen as serving the entire world. This may be so in the future; at the moment they are usually accessible only within a certain region at sufficient speed to be seriously usable. However, Web servers that are basically designed to serve a particular constituency belong to the most successful ones: they may be installed for a university, a school district, a company, an administrative unit, a certain city, etc., where users have access via reasonably fast networks. Such servers may still make use of the Web as a global network, by importing large chunks of information, `caching' them, so to speak, locally. We will return to this later and in particular detail in Chapter 28. For the time being it is enough to realize that (a) small individual servers have to merge into substantial conglomerates to be useful and (b) servers can be set up to serve the world ...or just a small part of it; and the latter variety should not be underestimated.

Figure: Typical `home page' with inline images on a server `Down Under'

4.1.1 Display issues

4.1.2 Navigational issues

4.1.3 Maintenance issues