An Architecture to Support an Open Distributed Hypermedia System

Contemporary systems, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), have illustrated how crucial global access to information is to the Internet community. For many, the WWW also serves as an introduction to the concept of hypermedia, demonstrating its potential in providing an integrated and unifying paradigm for information organisation. As demands upon the WWW grew, it became apparent that the simplicities in its hypertext model were proving inadequate as the requirements moved from pure information access to incorporate information management, discovery and navigation. The WWW community are now looking towards open hypermedia strategies to help solve these problems. In general, Microcosm2 meets the requirements of an open hypermedia system, but is weak in its support for distributed operation, although Hill3 describes initial experimentation with a networked version. This article outlines significant advances on Hill’s contribution through the provision of a heterogeneous and distributed framework, above which a new open hypermedia system has been layered. The new system retains the Microcosm philosophy but offers greater scaleability, improved process management and more efficient communication. We anticipate that users will benefit from the superior model for open hypermedia that this widely distributed version of Microcosm provides.