The HEFTI Model of Text to Hypertext Conversion

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Abstract
Manual authoring is a major bottleneck in the more widespread use of hypertext. The authoring process has been shown to be slow and labour intensive and hence expensive. Yet there already exists a large body of printed material which can be adopted for hypertext and hypermedia. In the project HEFTI (Hypertext Extraction From Text Incrementally), we are exploring methods of converting printed text into hypertext. We have developed a model which breaks the conversion process into a sequence of six modular components. The output of the conversion process are hypertext documents in a general specification language. In this paper we detail the model and our implementation of the HEFTI model. We believe the system demonstrates the validity of the model as it was used to convert a medium-sized technical textbook into hypertext within a (long) working day. We furthermore discuss two usability experiments that we carried out on HEFTI produced documents. In the conclusion of this paper we look at some open research issues.

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