I have focused on hypermedia as a theoretical and practical means to facilitate access and comprehension. Hypermedia enables people. Hypermedia, as a concept, encourages authors to structure information as an associative network of nodes and interrelating links. This frees authors from the linear, sequential structure that dominates most printed documents. Presenting information as an associative network enables readers to access information in the order most appropriate to their purposes. Through the process of structuring information, authors often come to understand that information better. For readers, freedom of access within an associative structure enhanced with contextual information provides a rich environment for understanding the information they find. Furthermore, hypermedia supports a new, alternate philosophy for analysts and application developers to think of a system in terms of its interrelationships and to provide the application's users the means to access information directly through these interrelationships.
Much of my research applies hypermedia to other domains, such as educational instruction, collaborative environments, decision support systems (DSS), geographic information systems (GIS), transportation, database, software engineering, process engineering, enterprise engineering, and executive information systems (EIS). Hypermedia can supplement applications in these domains and others with a rich feature set including guided tours, recommended paths, annotation, information overviews, and sophisticated backtracking. For developers to bother supplementing their applications, however, they must find hypermedia functionality simple to incorporate. Thus I have focused much of my research, and that of NJIT's Hypermedia Research Laboratory, on incorporating and generating hypermedia functionality automatically based on an application's existing internal structure. This forms the focus of our hypermedia engine projects.
Several of our other projects are facilitating richer forms of information access and comprehension within World Wide Web applications. Web authors currently function in a hypermedia environment analogous to second-generation computing languages (i.e., assembler language), building and managing all hypermedia links using simple anchors and single-step navigation. We are providing Web developers with the tools to incorporate high-level hypermedia features into Web environments in a principled and well-structured manner with minimal effort, so everyday authors and readers can utilize them.
The field of information systems strongly influences my work. I define computer science as the study of technology, and information systems as the study of applying technology. Thus much of my work focuses on how concepts and technologies can serve people and organizations best.
I bring this vantage point to my other research interests as well, which include collaboration, systems integration, enterprise engineering and executive information systems. I have contributed to grants or currently am initiating projects in all these areas.
Finally, I note that as a professor, I bring many of my research goals to the classroom. Facilitating access to knowledge and making information more comprehensible led me to academia, and influences both the way I teach and my efforts in educational research.