Introducing Hypertextual Glossaries in a Multi-user Didactic Environment

In this work we present a object class named Glossary. The instances of the class Glossary (Glossaries) are specialised hypertexts for a multi-user didactic hypertextual environment. An object belonging to the class Glossary is an aggregation of objects. Among the classes comprising the class Glossary, the class Definition assumes relevant importance. Each glossary can include one or more objects of the class Definition. An instance of Definition is a specialised object that allows the display of the glossary’s definitions. A glossary replies to the requests coming from other hypertextual objects in the environment by sending back to the calling hypertext copies of objects belonging to the class Definition. The copies received by a calling hypertext become components of the hypertext. A calling hypertext can reside on any authorised remote machine connected to the Glossary server machine. Since the instances of the class Definition are themselves hypertextual objects, they can also include starting points of links and, therefore, they keep all their properties also when included in a calling hypertext. The class Glossary is an example of what we consider didactic hypertextual materials. The objects belonging to the class Glossary have been implemented in Openscript involving the use of the DB3 standard libraries. The dynamic word-stemming algorithm has been coded in a Dynamic Link Library and is written in C language. The Glossary server is implemented using a standard Unix NFS server.