Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
chapters, a whole book or even several documents. To account for this practice, our
model supports the entities to be linked to be of different extent. An entity can have
either of the following scopes:
•
an entire document
•
an area within a document (this area can span several columns and/or pages), or
•
a collection of documents
Each document or document collection can be represented on paper or on the
screen. Hence, associations can span the paper/digital boundary. While we model
passages within documents as regions of space, our interaction technique could be
coupled with the automatic extraction of document elements [165]. This would al-
low for linking specific semantic objects within the document.
The generic pen gesture described above has different meanings depending on
which area it is performed on. This provides for an intuitive and flexible way of
defining different link anchors. Different types of association areas are contained
on printed and digital documents, on physical books and on physical folders. Each
type of area represents another scope. Figure 6.6 provides an overview of these
types of association areas. It shows how the physical areas are complemented by
digital representations. In the document viewer, the areas are displayed at the same
positions on the documents as on paper. In the ecological view (see Section 6.4
below), the nodes of the graph that represent the documents act as digital association
areas. On these areas, the pen gesture for creating hyperlinks can be performed in
the same manner as on paper. We now discuss each type of association area in turn.
Fig. 6.6
Types of association
areas
