Standardizing Hypertext: Where Next for OHP?

Over the last six years the Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group (OHSWG) has been working in a coordinated effort to produce a protocol which will allow components of an Open Hypermedia System to talk to one another in a standardised manner. In this paper we reflect on this work and the knowledge that has come out of it, evaluating the different approaches to standardisation in the light of our experiences. We discuss the problems we encountered and redefine the goals of the effort to be more realistic, presenting the Fundamental Open Hypermedia Model (FOHM) as an example of this more realistic approach. Finally we describe a possible future path that encompasses the research interests of the OHSWG while still leading ultimately to interoperability.

[1]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  Light hypermedia link services: a study of third party application integration , 1994, ECHT '94.

[2]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  OHP: A Draft Proposal for a Standard Open Hypermedia Protocol , 1996 .

[3]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  Addressing interoperability in open hypermedia: The design of the open hypermedia protocol , 1999, New Rev. Hypermedia Multim..

[4]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  FOHM: a fundamental open hypertext model for investigating interoperability between hypertext domains , 2000, HYPERTEXT '00.

[5]  Norbert A. Streitz,et al.  Hypertext: concepts, systems and applications , 1992 .

[6]  Peter J. Nürnberg,et al.  Open architectures for integrated, hypermedia-based information systems , 1994, 1994 Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[7]  Peter J. Nürnberg,et al.  CAOS: a collaborative and open spatial structure service component with incremental spatial parsing , 1999, HYPERTEXT '99.

[8]  C. M. Sperberg-McQueen,et al.  Extensible Markup Language (XML) , 1997, World Wide Web J..

[9]  Wenfei Fan,et al.  Keys with Upward Wildcards for XML , 2001, DEXA.

[10]  Richard N. Taylor,et al.  Chimera: hypertext for heterogeneous software environments , 1994, ECHT '94.

[11]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  MICROCOSM: An Open Model for Hypermedia with Dynamic Linking , 1990, ECHT.

[12]  Mayer D. Schwartz,et al.  The Dexter Hypertext Reference Model , 1994, CACM.

[13]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  A Proposal for a new KQML Specification , 1997 .

[14]  Uffe Kock Wiil,et al.  Hyperform: using extensibility to develop dynamic, open, and distributed hypertext systems , 1992, ECHT '92.

[15]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  Solent - A Platform for Distributed Open Hypermedia Applications , 1999, DEXA.

[16]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  Naming in OHP , 1999 .

[17]  Les Carr,et al.  The Distributed Link Service: A Tool for Publishers, Authors, and Readers , 1995, WWW.

[18]  Wendy Hall,et al.  SoFAR with DIM Agents: An agent framework for Distributed Information Management , 2000 .

[19]  Antoine Rizk,et al.  Multicard: an open hypermedia system , 1993, ECHT '92.

[20]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  Don't link me in: set based hypermedia for taxonomic reasoning , 1991, HYPERTEXT '91.

[21]  C. M. Sperberg-McQueen,et al.  Extensible markup language , 1997 .

[22]  Frank M. Shipman,et al.  Spatial hypertext: designing for change , 1995, CACM.

[23]  Kasper Østerbye,et al.  Proceedings of the ECHT'94 Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems , 1994 .

[24]  Randall H. Trigg,et al.  Design issues for a Dexter-based hypermedia system , 1994, CACM.

[25]  Hugh C. Davis,et al.  Dynamic Service Discovery and Invocation in OHP , 1999 .

[26]  Randall H. Trigg,et al.  Design issues for a Dexter-based hypermedia system , 1992, ECHT '92.