THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HYPERTEXT

How individuals, organizations, and nations fare depends to a large de gree on the quality of the knowledge they possess and the skill wide w hich it is used to make good decisions. When problems are complex, lac k of knowledge leads to mental confusion which, in turn, leads to poor decisions and failure. Barring blind luck, the quality of the decisio n can't be better than the quality of the knowledge behind it. The gre ater the knowledge and expertise the decision maker can apply to the p roblem, the more astute he or she is likely to be and the greater the chance that the decision will be a good one. Hypertext, especially in conjunction with Al, is thought to be the most powerful intellectual t echnology we have developed so far for effective knowledge management and delivery. In the scientific arena, hypertext technology can be use d to support the entire scientific process from data management to syn thesis and theory development to communicating results. The purpose of the attached hyperdocument is to present a clear and concise guidelin e for building hypertext systems on microcomputers. We hope that after reading and experimenting with this hypertext system, readers will ha ve learned the basic concepts and skills needed to develop their own h yper-documents,