Processing Structured Hypermedia : A Matter of Style

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, hypermedia has become the uniform interface to the wide variety of information sources available over the Internet. The full potential of the Web, however, can only be realized by building on the strengths of its underlying research fields. This book describes the areas of hypertext, multimedia, electronic publishing and the World Wide Web and points out fundamental similarities and differences in approaches towards the processing of information. It gives an overview of the dominant models and tools developed in these fields and describes the key interrelationships and mutual incompatibilities. In addition to a formal specification of a selection of these models, the book discusses the impact of the models described on the software architectures that have been developed for processing hypermedia documents. Two example hypermedia architectures are described in more detail: the DejaVu object-oriented hypermedia framework, developed at the VU, and CWI's Berlage environment for time-based hypermedia document transformations

An Object Model for Collaborative Systems and a Toolkit to Support Collaborative Activities

The goal of a collaborative system is to provide a platform for group discussion so that the ideas of the majority can be captured and categorized. Such a platform would incorporate functionality to allow a group of experts to thoroughly explore and analyze a problem domain by following a discourse structure they could design, maintain and evolve as the knowledge structure for that particular domain. However, there are very few practical tools in current systems to support coordination strategy such as voting and scaling, and collaborative model building for learning. Any practical tool is better than an excellent theory. Our recent work is to design and implement a toolkit for collaboration. This toolkit supports the general tools for collaborative activities, and is easily accessed on the Web. In this paper, we first illustrate the object model for collaborative systems; then, we discuss the basic requirements for collaborative systems that should be supported in the toolkit. The key problems of collaborative systems are also analyzed. Our proposal solution is to provide a collaborative toolkit. At last, we give the descriptions of this toolkit

Augmenting applications with hyper media, functionality and meta-information

The Dynamic Hypermedia Engine (DHE) enhances analytical applications by adding relationships, semantics and other metadata to the application\u27s output and user interface. DHE also provides additional hypermedia navigational, structural and annotation functionality. These features allow application developers and users to add guided tours, personal links and sharable annotations, among other features, into applications. DHE runs as a middleware between the application user interface and its business logic and processes, in a n-tier architecture, supporting the extra functionalities without altering the original systems by means of application wrappers. DHE automatically generates links at run-time for each of those elements having relationships and metadata. Such elements are previously identified using a Relation Navigation Analysis. DHE also constructs more sophisticated navigation techniques not often found on the Web on top of these links. The metadata, links, navigation and annotation features supplement the application\u27s primary functionality. This research identifies element types, or classes , in the application displays. A mapping rule encodes each relationship found between two elements of interest at the class level . When the user selects a particular element, DHE instantiates the commands included in the rules with the actual instance selected and sends them to the appropriate destination system, which then dynamically generates the resulting virtual (i.e. not previously stored) page. DHE executes concurrently with these applications, providing automated link generation and other hypermedia functionality. DHE uses the extensible Markup Language (XMQ -and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets of XML recommendations, like Xlink, XML Schema, and RDF -to encode the semantic information required for the operation of the extra hypermedia features, and for the transmission of messages between the engine modules and applications. DHE is the only approach we know that provides automated linking and metadata services in a generic manner, based on the application semantics, without altering the applications. DHE will also work with non-Web systems. The results of this work could also be extended to other research areas, such as link ranking and filtering, automatic link generation as the result of a search query, metadata collection and support, virtual document management, hypermedia functionality on the Web, adaptive and collaborative hypermedia, web engineering, and the semantic Web

Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Experimental Object-Oriented Modelling

This thesis examines object-oriented modelling in experimental system development. Object-oriented modelling aims at representing concepts and phenomena of a problem domain in terms of classes and objects. Experimental system development seeks active experimentation in a system development project through, e.g., technical prototyping and active user involvement. We introduce and examine "experimental object-oriented modelling" as the intersection of these practices

HILT IV : subject interoperability through building and embedding pilot terminology web services

A report of work carried out within the JISC-funded HILT Phase IV project, the paper looks at the project's context against the background of other recent and ongoing terminologies work, describes its outcome and conclusions, including technical outcomes and terminological characteristics, and considers possible future research and development directions. The Phase IV project has taken HILT to the point where the launch of an operational support service in the area of subject interoperability is a feasible option and where both investigation of specific needs in this area and practical collaborative work are sensible and feasible next steps. Moving forward requires detailed work, not only on terminology interoperability and associated service delivery issues, but also on service and end user needs and engagement, service sustainability issues, and the practicalities of interworking with other terminology services and projects in UK, Europe, and global contexts

An analysis framework for CSCW systems

Software toolkits are under development to help construct applications that support group-working. Toolkit developers adopt different approaches to group-work support in order to tackle different issues and a toolkit is commonly characterised by the approach adopted. It is difficult to compare toolkits because of this lack of apparent commonality and it is difficult to decide which toolkits meet specific application requirements. [Continues.