eScience eScience DiplomaProject

Title : GUI to ManyPage, or how to organise a navigation/browsing tree

• Status : in progress

• Student : Prabhath Waduge <pwaduge@yahoo.com>

• Tutor : Pascal Vuylsteker <pvk@vuylsteker.net>

• Period : Second Semester 2002

• Keywords : GUI, ManyPage, web site hierarchy, MacOSX (Unix)

• Report (link to the final report)

Description

The physical organisation of files inside a web file system does not always reflect the actual way we want the user to navigate and perceive a web site. As a result, it may be necessary to describe this navigation in some sort of Meta data. In ManyPage, a .link file is placed in each directory to describe the relative organisation of local files. NB. We are dealing here with more than an simple tree representation : more than the simple father/soon relationship, the order of the brother file represent the horizontal navigation in a given set of file.

Here is some instance of such files

Chapter2 .link : 
 ../index.+
	: page1.+
	: Sub1/page2
	: Sub1/page3 Rem: not usefull
	: Sub1/page4
	: page5.+
	:	: page51.+
	: 	: Sub2/page52.+

Sub1 .link :
../page1.+ <UP>../../index.+</UP>
page2.+	
page3.+
page4.+
../page5.+

The aim of this project is to provide a graphical and portable (Java ?) tool to create a global hierarchy/navigation (relative to a given directory), to save it in a global file (.linkGlobal) and to export that information into the local .link files

More Information

• list of links about the subject
  • http://www.vrarchitect.net/ManyPage

Tips / details

As long that the global file is unique and is the main source, the problem is quit simple (mainly a ergonomic issue) It could be interesting to study how it could be possible to inverse the process (create a global file from the local .link files) and especially how to deal with imcompatibility between this .link file.

It should too be possible to move the global file from one level to another.

Eventually, the format/name of the link files is given here to work with ManyPage tool. The programme should be build in such a way that it should be easily possible to use another format. An illustration of that should be to allow an XML description of the hierarchy instead of the default required format.