Some conditions for cost efficiency in hypermedia

Abstract

Recent advances in multimedia and hypertext have created new opportunities for providing information to business and consumers. Hypermedia has appeared as an important tool for accessing the Internet. Prior hypermedia research mainly has recommended design standards for the interface. The current research models the administrative and operating costs surrounding a hypermedia database, and determines seven conditions for the cost justification of hypermedia. These are (1) higher linking costs proportionately reduce the total number of links implemented; (2) increasing the benefits from using the database increases the total number of links proportionately; (3) increasing database size results in an increase in the total number of links implemented; (4) if the database user learns from the database slowly, then a larger number of links need to be provided; (5) the maximum size of database which is justified on cost will increase as the average cost of linking each node becomes smaller; (6) the total benefit from usage required in order to cost justify a database will decrease as the average cost of linking each node becomes smaller and (7) the maximum size of database which is cost justified will increase rapidly as the learning rate increases—large databases are more easily justified if the users can be assured of picking up useful information when traversing the nodes. The learning rate can be increased by careful construction of links and nodes so that they are maximally informative.