Many websites offer their users a lot of freedom to navigate through a large hyperspace. Some sites offer navigation or orientation support in the form of (complete or partial) site maps or guided tours. Some sites also use adaptive hypermedia techniques such as link annotation to help users find their way, based on an individual or group user model. In such systems the navigation support is often tied to the existing link structure. In this paper we discuss how websites can also offer adaptive navigation and orientation support like site maps and guided tours that are independent of the underlying link structure of the website. In particular, we show how the AHAM model, introduced in [6], can represent such adaptive global or local orientation support. To this end we define Link-Independent Navigation Support (LINS) that provides the user a better understandable navigation environment and a strong connection among pages at different abstraction levels in hyperspace. AHAM provides a design platform to define all kinds of relationship graphs, called abstract views in this paper. Abstract views describe connectivity among concepts independently from the basic link structure of the underlying hyperspace, and LINS is based on abstract views.
['Pme Paul De Bra']
Link-independent navigation support in web-based adaptive hypermedia