Over the past several years, a number of information discovery and access tools have been introduced in the Internet, including Archie, Gopher, Netfind, and WAIS. These tools have become quite popular, and are helping to redefine how people think about wide-area network applications. Yet, they are not well suited to supporting the future information infrastructure, which will be characterized by enormous data volume, rapid growth in the user base, and burgeoning data diversity. In this paper we indicate trends in these three dimensions and survey problems these trends will create for current approaches. We then suggest several promising directions of future resource discovery research, along with some initial results from projects carried out by members of the Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service.

This paper examines open hypermedia systems, and presents the case that such systems provide a step forward for dealing with large, dynamic data sets in distributed, heterogeneous environments by allowing users to access and integrate information and processes in richer and more diverse ways than has previously been possible. In particular, the enhanced Microcosm model for open hypermedia is examined, and the ways in which it provides such an environment are discussed. The paper continues by investigating the advantages and the shortcomings of this model and identifies the areas in which further work must be completed before such systems can become widely adopted, such as the granularity of source and destination anchors, editing and version control. Some attempts to provide solutions to these problems are presented and discussed.

g the course of a task. Many of these applications involve the collection, comprehension, 88 August 1995/Vol. 38, No. 8 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM Catherine C. Marshall Frank M. Shipman III Spatial Hypertext: Designing for Change ypertext, 1 in its most general sense, allows content to appear in different contexts. The immediate setting in which readers encounter a specific segment of material then changes from reading to reading or from reader to reader. Authors collect and structure materials to reflect their own understanding or in anticipation of readers' possible interests, needs, or ability to comprehend the substrate of interrelated content. 1 We use the term hypertext broadly, to cover both textual and multimedia content. Node A Node A Node D Node E Node C Node B Node A and interpretation of diverse materials

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In this paper, we report about the design, development, and implementation of the SEPIA cooperative hypermedia authoring environment. It provides results on the following aspects of SEPIA: persistent and shared data storage, hypermedia data model with composites, sophisticated and comprehensive authoring functionality, support for a new rhetoric and for cooperative work. We start by identifying the challenge of hypermedia authoring and production which serves as the driving force for our development. Using interacting problem spaces as the vehicle for modelling the dynamic aspects of authoring, we arrive at a set of requirements answered by the concept of "activity spaces". The design of coherent hyperdocuments is facilitated by our "construction kit". Furthermore, we describe the extensions and modifications necessary to support multiple authors with the cooperative version of SEPIA. The central issue of the paper is the system architecture and its implementation. We describe the basi...

ions Implementation-level: pages, links, presentation styles Reuse Plug-in components; Reusable presentation styles Architecture Two-tiers, based on file system Static binding of content to pages Usability High graphical control through manual authoring High coherence through use of presentation styles Low customization, no adaptivity, no proactivity 236 . P. Fraternali ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 31, No. 3, September 1999 metaphor (e.g., in Director, objects' synchronization is defined by editing the score for the cast members of a stage; see Figure 6). ---The type of database connectivity, which may range from support of an internal database, of an external database via gateway software (typically ODBC or JDBC), or of an external database through DBMS API. ---The type of Web connectivity, which may be achieved by means of a plug-in application extending a Web browser, or by exporting the hypermedia application into a network language. Web connectivity may affect database c...

Hypertext systems have traditionally focused on information management and presentation. In contrast, the Aquanet hypertext system described in this paper is designed to support knowledge structuring tasks. Aquanet is a browser-based tool that allows users to graphically represent information in order to explore its structure. In this paper, we discuss our motivations for developing Aquanet. We then describe the basic concepts underlying the tool and give an overview of the user interface. We close with some brief comments about our initial experiences with the tool in use and some of the directions we see the Aquanet research moving in the near future. from Hypertext `91 Proceedings, San Antonio, Texas, December 15-18, 1991 Draft of: August 28, 1991 10:21 am 1 Aquanet: a hypertext tool to hold your knowledge in place 1 1.

rom the beginning, hypermedia application design has been driven primarily by technological innovations and constrained by technical feasibility. For the last few years, however, usability methods and results from human factors research have been gaining more influence [17]. Despite this trend toward user-oriented development procedures, issues of cognition and human information processing still are widely neglected and barely influence hypermedia design.

Sun’s Link Service, a product shipped with Sun’s programming in the large software development environment, the Network Software Environment, allows users to make and maintain explicit and persistent bidirectional relationships between autonomous frontend applications. The Link Service defines a protocol for an extensible and loosely coupled, or open, hypertext system. An interesting instance of this is the ability to link to objects in closed hypertext systems if they integrate with the Link Service. The Link Service addresses link maintenance and automated versioning. Link endpoints, or nodes, are defined by the integrating applications, and are not restricted to points, whole documents, or cards.

The World-Wide Web (WWW) is an ever growing, distributed, non-administered, global information resource. It resides on the worldwide computer network and allows access to heterogeneous information: text, image, video, sound and graphic data. Currently, this wealth of information is difficult to mine. One can either manually, slowly and tediously navigate through the WWW or utilize indexes and libraries which are built by automatic search engines (called knowbots or robots). We have designed and are now implementing a high level SQL-like language to support effective and flexible query processing, which addresses the structure and content of WWW nodes and their varied sorts of data. Query results are intuitively presented and continuously maintained when desired. The language itself integrates new utilities and existing Unix tools (e.g. grep, awk). The implementation strategy is to employ existing WWW browsers and Unix tools to the extent possible. 1