NoteCards is a general hypermedia environment designed to help people work with ideas. Its intended users are authors, designers, and other intellectual laborers engaged in analyzing information, designing artifacts, and generally processing ideas. The system provides these users with a variety of hypermedia-based tools for collecting, representing, managing, interrelating, and communicating ideas. This paper presents the NoteCards system as a foil against which to explore some of the major limitations of the current generation of hypermedia systems. In doing so, this paper highlights seven of the major issues that must be addressed in the next generation of hypermedia systems. These seven issues are: search and query, composite nodes, virtual structures, computational engines, versioning, collaborative work, and tailorability. For each of these issues, the papers describes the limitations inherent in NoteCards and the prospects for doing improving the situation in future systems.

Visualisation is very important in medicine and biology, however, it is not fully used. We focus on visualisation techniques used in genome browsers and report on a new technique, CartoonPlus, which improves the visual representation of data. We describe our use of smooth zooming and panning, and a new scaling algorithm and focus on view manipulation options. CartoonPlus allows the users to see data not in original size but scaled, depending on a data type which is chosen interactively by the users. In VisGenome as the basis for scaling we have chosen genes. All genes have the same size and all other data is scaled with relationship to genes. Additionally, all other data, such as micro array probes or markers, which are smaller than genes, are scaled differently to reflect their partitioning into two categories: data which is in a gene region and data which is between genes. This results in a significant legibility improvement and should enhance the understanding of genome maps. Keywords: