Virtual Documents

Virtual documents are hypermedia documents that are generated on demand, in response to user (reader) input. Key properties of Web-based virtual documents are

• They look and feel like documents, both on input and what is returned.
• They are embedded in context of other web documentation.
• They are server-based, requiring no special software to be downloaded to the reader's machine.

Material on Virtual Documents

• Virtual documents that explain How Things Work: Dynamically generated question-answering documents a paper on virtual documents that generate explanations on demand, by Tom Gruber, Sunil Vemuri, and James Rice. This is the on-line version, with real examples on the Web that demonstrate the ideas.
• An introduction to virtual documents on the web a talk given to the Stanford WWW Conference on September 20, 1994.

Some exemplary virtual documents are collected below. If you know of a virtual document with a new twist, please let us know and we'll add it to the list.

Example Virtual Documents

• Generating custom maps
• Explaining how things work
• Virtual Frog Dissection Kit