Hypermedia is often viewed as either a paradigm for human-computer interaction or information organization. Human-computer interaction provides a view of hypermedia that involves the creation, manipulation, and access of information through a "point-and-click" navigation mechanism. Information organization provides a view of hypermedia that involves the storage of information as a set of data and metadata objects, where metadata objects capture structural relationships among information objects. This paper describes a third view of hypermedia --- hypermedia as a computing paradigm. In this paper, we explore the implications of pushing hypermedia beyond its traditional role in human-computer interaction and information organization into the computer's core operating environment. We believe the resulting hypermedia operating systems provide a new paradigm for computing --- one in which human-computer interaction, information storage and retrieval, programming, and control are integrated ...

Much of the previous work on version support for hypertext has focused primarily on the development of functionality for specific hypertext systems and/or a specific hypertext ap- plication domain. Although these models address crucial version support problems in specific hypertext application domains, they cannot be easily adapted and then integrated into other hypertext applications. Hypertext version support environments have been introduced to help alleviate these problems. They are designed to meet the version support needs of a wide range of hypertext applications. However, so far few high level versioning facilities have been constructed in these environments, creating a gap between the facilities provided directly within the environment and the versioning needs of some applications. The intent of this research is to bridge this gap. It turned out that task-based versioning styles are easy to use by both hy- pertext application developers and hypertext application users. ...

Development of hypermedia systems is a complex matter. The current trend toward open, extensible and distributed multiuser hypermedia systems adds additional complexity to the development process. As a means of reducing this complexity, we have seen an increasing interest in hyperbase management systems that allow hypermedia system developers to abstract from the intricacies and complexity of the hyperbase layer and fully attend to application and user interface issues. Design, development and deployment experiences of a dynamic, open and distributed multiuser hypermedia system development environment called Hyperform is presented. Hyperform is based on the concepts of extensibility, tailorability and rapid prototyping of hypermedia system services. Open, extensible hyperbase management systems permit hypermedia system developers to tailor hypermedia functionality for specific applications and serve as a platform for research. The Hyperform development environment is comprised of multiple instances of four component types: (1) a hyperbase management system server, (2) a tool integrator, (3) editors and (4) participating tools. Hyperform has been deployed in Unix environments and experiments have shown that

Most hypertext systems are divided into three layers [11]: a storage layer providing persistence to the system, an application layer providing the functionality of the system and a presentation layer enabling users to interact with the system. There seems to be a growing consensus in the field on separating the storage layer from the application and presentation layers by creating separate

Abstract. The focus if this paper is user modeling in the context of personalization of information systems. Such a personalization is essential to give users the feeling that the system is easily accessible. The way this adaptive personalization works is very dependent on the adaptation model that is chosen. We introduce a generic two-dimensional classification framework for user modeling systems. This enables us to clarify existing as well as new applications in the area of user modeling. In order to illustrate our framework we evaluate push and pull based user modeling. 1

This position paper argues that the structural computing workshop should cover more research ground than just structural computing systems. The ongoing research thread on multiple open service systems is close related to the structural computing systems research thread, and as such is very relevant to the workshop. The paper starts with a historical perspective on hypermedia infrastructure research as an attempt to place current research on structural computing systems and multiple open service systems in context. The remainder of the paper focuses on multiple open service systems. The basic ideas, goals and characteristics of multiple open service systems are described.

This paper describes the Palimpsest data model, which describes flexible merging and tracking of individual changes to shared hypertext or multimedia documents. Palimpsest is designed to represent and manage the sorts of versioning problems that will inevitably occur in distributed collaborative manipulation of shared data. In fact, in a cooperative editing environment the problems that Palimpsest addresses must be handled, regardless of whether revision maintenance is a primary feature of the user interface. By basing the fundamental structures of Palimpsest on the individual changes (or deltas) made to the shared data at a fine grain, a wide variety of revision management strategies can be represented, while the scope of possible conflicts is reduced to the smallest possible portion of the document. Keywords: version control, computer-supported cooperative work, collaborative editing, hypertext systems, concurrency. Introduction The topic of version maintenance has been a traditional...

Aspects of external structure are delineated, including scope, valence, directionality, and behavior specificity. Locality of structure is discussed from several aspects; structures may be composable; composed structures may pose computational difficulties, raising the issue of incomplete structure in the case of interrupts. Structure locality must be semantically relevant. Structure locality may need to be specifically indicated, or to the contrary may need to be discovered by the reader without specific indication. Structure poses its own rendering problems. Scopes, valences, etc. need to be rendered; such rendering may have aesthetic or human factors consequences that conflict with other goals of the hypertext author. Behavior flexibility is required. Representation of structure includes such aspects as collapse/expand and structure filtering. Representation of location within structure must allow for a non-unitary concept of location. Parastructure has its own rendering requirement...

This article introduces Atomic Hypermedia which, unlike traditional hypermedia approaches, does not use the concept of a node. Instead, all content is represented as single character ‘atoms’ which are placed along an arbitrary number of dimensions. This approach addresses some of the issues with node-based hypermedia. The article describes the basic mechanics of Atomic Data Structure, and how hypermedia behaviours can be obtained.