Designing the Digital Agora: pushing the Web envelope

The Digital Agora is an information resource that supports understanding and analysis of complex problems in the social sciences. Large amounts of data are available from many different sources, such as governments, institutes, non governmental organizations, and international bodies. The Digital Agora is based on an open hypertext design that includes authorship of nodes and links by all participants through discussion groups, collaborative analysis, simulations, and graphical representations of complex issues. It is currently used to support Political Sciences courses at Acadia University. The paper presents issues related to the design of hypertext on the Web that support the broad vision of the Digital Agora. The need for persistent and virtual nodes and persistent and virtual links is discussed. Links are categorized broadly as simple, relationship, and agent links. Viewing the increasing complexity of links is instructive in understanding how to manage the incorporation of complex hypertext functionality into Web based designs