Finding the Story - Broader Applicability of Semantics and Discourse for Hypermedia Generation

Generating hypermedia presentations requires processing constituent material into coherent, unified presentations. One large challenge is creating a generic process for producing hypermedia presentations from the semantics of potentially unfamiliar domains. The resulting presentations must both respect the underlying semantics and appear as coherent, plausible and, if possible, pleasant to the user. Among the related unsolved problems is the inclusion of discourse knowledge in the generation process. One potential approach is generating a discourse structure derived from generic processing of the underlying domain semantics, transforming this to a structured progression and then using this to steer the choice of hypermedia communicative devices used to convey the actual information in the resulting presentation. This paper presents the results of the first phase of the Topia project, which explored this approach. These results include an architecture for this more domain-independent processing of semantics and discourse into hypermedia presentations. We demonstrate this architecture with an implementation using Web standards and freely available technologies.