Cross-Media Document Linking and Navigation

Documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. However, due to a multitude of proprietary document formats with rather simple link models, today's possibilities for creating hyper-links between snippets of information in different document formats are limited. In previous work, we have presented a dynamically extensible cross-document link service overcoming the limitations of the simple link models supported by most existing document formats. Based on a plug-in mechanism, our link service enables the linking across different document types. In this paper, we assess the extensibility of our link service by integrating some document formats as well as third-party document viewers. We illustrate the flexibility of creating advanced hyperlinks across these document formats and viewers that cannot be realised with existing linking solutions or link models of existing document formats. A user study further investigates the user experience when creating and navigating cross-document hyperlinks.