An agenda for open hypermedia research

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe historical development of hypermedia systems can be characterized as a series of successive abstractions of functionality away from the "core" hypermedia server, often resulting in a new open layer in the hypermedia environment architecture. Recently, this trend of abstraction has been applied to the hypermedia server itself, replacing the notion of a single, closed hypermedia server with an open layer of structure servers. This newest development brings with it a new set of challenges and research issues for open hypermedia researchers. In this paper, we discuss these issues, review some of our collective applicable experience with contemporary open hypermedia systems and other work, and point out some of the more pressing and intriguing open questions that we feel are facing open hypermedia researchers today. We also examine the "split" in the current hypermedia research community between "system" and "domain" researchers and the still-present need for interoperability among systems, and discuss why any attempt to address the issues we discuss in this paper must account for these observations. Hypermedia systems have developed over the past several decades from the monolithic systems of Bush and Engelbart to the open hypermedia systems of today. Each development in hypermedia system design has been characterized by increased openness, which in turn led to greater applicability and flexibility. Recently, open hypermedia researchers have started to address opening the hypermedia server itself, discussing hypermedia environments that consist of an open layer of structure servers with their associated servers and clients. This "component-based" hypermedia middleware approach allows us to support a much wider range ol structural abstractions than has been possible with the closed link server layers that are typical in contemporary systems.With these new hypermedia component-based systems comes a new set of research issues. Although we have little direct experience with many of these new issues, we do have a wealth of related experience upon which we can draw to form initial understandings. In this paper, we present an agenda containing some of the new issues that confront us as we consider the next generation of component-based open hypermedia systems (CB-OHS's). We also present a framework that allows us to generate and analyze these issues systematically.KEYWORDS: Open hypermedia system (OHS), componentbased open hypermedia system (CB-OHS), structural computing, hypermedia middleware, hyperbase, hypermedia operating system, hypermedia domain research Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.HyperText 98 Pittsburgh PA USA Copyright ACM 1...

A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems

“…Work on the design of an open hypermedia protocol has also been undertaken (Reich et al, 1999). A number of research areas for open hypermedia have been identified (Nürnberg et al, 1998) addressing the human perception and use of hypermedia, hypermedia client-servers, structure servers and hypermedia systems backend. An approach for offering OHS to the WWW has also been proposed by Karousos et al (2003).…”

Semantically annotated hypermedia services

“…Solutions like the Server Information Management (SIM), which collects server name and location information from servers and distributes it to clients [9], as well as the notion of Hypermedia Resource Descriptors (HRD) that can describe both documents and servers [10], have been proposed. Furthermore, the Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP), which was initially designed to Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”

“…Correspondingly we modified the Babylon Web service so as to conform to its description. It is in our imminent plans to investigate the various Component-Based Open Hypermedia Systems [9], as well as the various systems developed under the discipline of Structural Computing [14], like Themis [15], in order to implement corresponding instances, and identify possible required enhancements for the ontology.…”

Addressing interoperability in open hypermedia: the design of the open hypermedia protocol

“…So some might specialize in writing scalable high performance servers; others might specialize in implementing feature-packed clients. Also, integrations or adaptations would only have to be done once (9). Furthermore, the increased availability of standard tools would result in a proven and stable platform on which developers could prototype and evaluate their new tools.…”