Open hypermedia in the industrial environment

The management of information is one of the greatest problems facing industry today. Whilst many firms have introduced computer systems into the office environment, providing access to electronic information on the shop floor to support the manufacturing process is a much more complex problem. The paper looks at the application of open hypermedia systems to the development of information systems to support the manufacturing process. A particular focus of the work was the development of an interface that was easy to use by engineers on the shop floor whilst still giving them full access to all the maintenance, set-up and fault diagnostic information in the application, and potentially integration with other computing systems in use by the company.