Hypermedia maintenance support applications: Benefits and development costs

The most common questions asked by industrialists regarding any electronic based systems to support maintenance activities are, what are the benefits and how much will it cost. In this paper we will consider these questions by examining two hypermedia based maintenance support systems. In order to access the tangible and intangible benefits of hypermedia, the identification of benefits and cost are required at an early stage of the development process. This paper discusses some of the benefits to be gained by industry from using hypermedia applications to support their information provision. The cost is directly related to the effort required to produce a hypermedia application, with the greatest effort in authoring. Two methods of costing are presented: a detailed engineering approach and an approach using heuristics. In addition we will comment on how the presented approaches can be applied to Web and Semantic Web applications.