infonet-economy

Learning by collaboratively writing scientific hyperbooks requires specific software tools. We present a model for creating, managing, and viewing the contents of the hyperbook. The model we propose includes the representation of information fragments and their relationships; a specific representation of concepts (terminological fragments) and a language for the creation of hypertext views adapted to the various objectives of the users. The definition of concepts, which plays an essential role in scientific writings, is represented in a formal language of the descriptive logic kind, which enables to apply various automatic processing to them. Moreover, the same concept can be defined according to various points of view. A purely declarative language allows the definition of the views that constitute the interface of the hyperbook. We also present the architecture of a hyperbook management system which is based on a database management system and a hypertext view generation system for databases.