A solution: Hypertext
Personal Experience with Hypertext
In 1980, I wrote a program for keeping track of software with which I was involved in the PS control system. Called Enquire, it allowed one to store snippets of information, and to link related pieces together in any way. To find information, one progressed via the links from one sheet to another, rather like in the old computer game "adventure". I used this for my personal record of people and modules. It was similar to the application Hypercard produced more recently by Apple for the Macintosh. A difference was that Enquire, although lacking the fancy graphics, ran on a multiuser system, and allowed many people to access the same data. 
Documentation of the RPC project            (concept) 
  Most of the documentation is available on VMS, with the two
  principle manuals being stored in the CERNDOC system. 
  1) includes: The VAX/NOTES conference VXCERN::RPC
  2) includes: Test and Example suite
  3) includes: RPC BUG LISTS
  4) includes: RPC System: Implementation Guide
    Information for maintenance, porting, etc.
  5) includes: Suggested Development Strategy for RPC Applications
  6) includes: "Notes on RPC", Draft 1, 20 feb 86
  7) includes: "Notes on Proposed RPC Development" 18 Feb 86
  8) includes: RPC User Manual
    How to build and run a distributed system.
  9) includes: Draft Specifications and Implementation Notes
  10) includes: The RPC HELP facility
  11) describes: THE REMOTE PROCEDURE CALL PROJECT in DD/OC 
 
 
 Help Display Select Back Quit Mark Goto_mark Link Add Edit
Fig 2. A screen in an Enquire scheme.
This example is basically a list, so the list of links is more important than the text on the node itself. Note that each link has a type ("includes" for example) and may also have comment associated with it. (The bottom line is a menu bar.) 
Soon after my re-arrival at CERN in the DD division, I found that the environment was similar to that in PS, and I missed Enquire. I therefore produced a version for the VMS, and have used it to keep track of projects, people, groups, experiments, software modules and hardware devices with which I have worked. I have found it personally very useful. I have made no effort to make it suitable for general consumption, but have found that a few people have successfully used it to browse through the projects and find out all sorts of things of their own accord. 
Hot spots
Meanwhile, several programs have been made exploring these ideas, both commercially and academically. Most of them use "hot spots" in documents, like icons, or highlighted phrases, as sensitive areas. touching a hot spot with a mouse brings up the relevant information, or expands the text on the screen to include it. Imagine, then, the references in this document, all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse. 
"Hypertext" is a term coined in the 1950s by Ted Nelson [...], which has become popular for these systems, although it is used to embrace two different ideas. One idea (which is relevant to this problem) is the concept: "Hypertext": Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way. 
The other idea, which is independent and largely a question of technology and time, is of multimedia documents which include graphics, speech and video. I will not discuss this latter aspect further here, although I will use the word "Hypermedia" to indicate that one is not bound to text. 
It has been difficult to assess the effect of a large hypermedia system on an organisation, often because these systems never had seriously large-scale use. For this reason, we require large amounts of existing information should be accessible using any new information management system.