Unifying Distributed Processing and Open Hypertext through a Heterogeneous Communication Model

A successful distributed open hypermedia system can be characterised by a scaleable architecture which is inherently distributed. While the architects of distributed hypermedia systems have addressed the issues of providing and retrieving distributed resources, they have often neglected to design systems with the inherent capability to exploit the distributed processing of this information. The research presented in this paper describes the construction and use of an open hypermedia system concerned equally with both of these facets

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Formal models, usability and related work in IR (editorial for special edition)

The Glasgow IR group has carried out both theoretical and empirical work, aimed at giving end users efficient and effective access to large collections of multimedia data

The pragmatic proof: hypermedia API composition and execution

Machine clients are increasingly making use of the Web to perform tasks. While Web services traditionally mimic remote procedure calling interfaces, a new generation of so-called hypermedia APIs works through hyperlinks and forms, in a way similar to how people browse the Web. This means that existing composition techniques, which determine a procedural plan upfront, are not sufficient to consume hypermedia APIs, which need to be navigated at runtime. Clients instead need a more dynamic plan that allows them to follow hyperlinks and use forms with a preset goal. Therefore, in this paper, we show how compositions of hypermedia APIs can be created by generic Semantic Web reasoners. This is achieved through the generation of a proof based on semantic descriptions of the APIs' functionality. To pragmatically verify the applicability of compositions, we introduce the notion of pre-execution and post-execution proofs. The runtime interaction between a client and a server is guided by proofs but driven by hypermedia, allowing the client to react to the application's actual state indicated by the server's response. We describe how to generate compositions from descriptions, discuss a computer-assisted process to generate descriptions, and verify reasoner performance on various composition tasks using a benchmark suite. The experimental results lead to the conclusion that proof-based consumption of hypermedia APIs is a feasible strategy at Web scale.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

AiGERM: A logic programming front end for GERM

AiGerm (Artificially Intelligent Graphical Entity Relation Modeler) is a relational data base query and programming language front end for MCC (Mission Control Center)/STP's (Space Test Program) Germ (Graphical Entity Relational Modeling) system. It is intended as an add-on component of the Germ system to be used for navigating very large networks of information. It can also function as an expert system shell for prototyping knowledge-based systems. AiGerm provides an interface between the programming language and Germ

Perspectives for Electronic Books in the World Wide Web Age

While the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) is steadily expanding, electronic books (e-books) remain a niche market. In this article, it is first postulated that specialized contents and device independence can make Web-based e-books compete with paper prints; and that adaptive features that can be implemented by client-side computing are relevant for e-books, while more complex forms of adaptation requiring server-side computations are not. Then, enhancements of the WWW standards (specifically of XML, XHTML, of the style-sheet languages CSS and XSL, and of the linking language XLink) are proposed for a better support of client-side adaptation and device independent content modeling. Finally, advanced browsing functionalities desirable for e-books as well as their implementation in the WWW context are described