Linking and Thinking: The use of typed informational relationships in aid of semantic navigation

An underlying challenge of hypertext systems is that of maintaining coherence in meaning when traversing nodes. Functional link typing is one method that has been proposed to address this challenge with the consequent action of increasing global coherence within the hypertext and facilitating increased comprehension. As such, functional link types are efficacious for navigating through the meaning relationships (semantics) of a hypertext and reduce reliance of physical navigation metaphors. The study described here employs a previously developed link type taxonomy in a Web-based journal publishing system (OJS). The goal is to enable readers to create functionally meaningful relationships between journal articles with the outcome of enhancing later, semantic based, navigation through the collection as a whole