Derivation of interaction environment and information object properties for enhanced integrated access and value‐adding to electronic documents

The recent unprecedented growth of information in digital form advocates the need for better ways to interact with this vast amount of richly‐conveyed information. This paper reviews and analyses the design considerations of an advanced information environment for users to interact in novel manners with online documents such as electronic journals. The interaction environment is also intended to support value‐adding of electronic documents. The design is inspired by analyses of user requirements in interacting with information, by advances in the electronic information world, and by innovations in human‐computer interaction. These led to the derivation and proposal of a set of properties in both the interaction environment and the information objects within the environment. The environment is a visually‐rich, interactive information environment based on user‐controlled malleability and integration with various interaction tools. The information objects within the environment are fractionally structured, contextualized and explicable, queriable and navigable at multiple levels of granularity, and associated with layers of additional information and metadata.