From Traditional to Electronic Glossaries in a Didactic Hypertextual Environment

In this work we present a object class named G_lossary. The instances of the class G_lossary (Glossaries) are specialised hypertexts for a didactic hypertextual environment. An object belonging to the class G_lossary is an aggregation of objects. Among the classes comprising the class G_lossary, the class D_efinition assumes relevant importance. Each glossary can include one or more objects of the class D_efinition. An instance of D_efinition 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 D_efinition. The copies received by a calling hypertext become components of the hypertext. Since the instances of the class D_efinition 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 G_lossary is an example of what we consider didactic hypertextual materials. The objects belonging to the class G_lossary 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.