THE APPLICATION OF LARGE-SCALE HYPERMEDIA INFORMATION-SYSTEMS TO TRAINING

A hypermedia system permits a user to have access to a wide range of stored information, in both structured and unstructured ways. While this technology is now generally accepted in education, it has not yet been widely exploited in industry. This paper discusses the implementation of a large-scale hypermedia information system for an industrial application. By the use of an open hypermedia system, the details of which are discussed in this paper, a common resource base can be used with different sets of links for a number of engineering activities, including maintenance and fault diagnostics. Having established the information system, the same resource base can be used as a training tool both to train personnel how to use the computer-based system and to train them in operational and maintenance tasks. The principle can be extended to many other application areas and represents a powerful and cost-effective method of on-the-job training in the use of computer-based information systems.