Hypermedia-aided design

Recently, the Internet has revolutionized many activities from entertainment to marketing and business. Two key underlying Internet technologies, efficient data delivery and hypertext, demonstrated exceptional potential as new application enablers. In this paper, we present a novel Hypermedia-Aided Design (HAD) collaboration framework that facilitates new communication and data presentation paradigms to improve the effectiveness of typical EDA applications. The framework leverages on the advantages of using semantic multicast as a communication backbone and quantized hypermedia presentations as an efficient data organization, retrieval, and presentation model. Semantic multicast is a global communication tool that relies on an internetwork of proxies to provide content discovery and semantics-based profile-driven data dissemination services. We introduce the notion of a quant, an atomic interactive multimedia information primitive with embedded hyperlinks. We demonstrate how interest-specific quant retrieval and concatenation can enable more focused collaboration. The HAD framework consists of a set of applications for student (designer)-centered CAD education (consulting), collaborative design and debugging, I-commerce, and technical support. In all applications, quant-based presentations enable that theoretical and practical components are tailored according to user's interest and performances. The conceptualized and implemented applications act in synergy with existing software, hardware, and system design tools.