Open Hypermedia: Systems, Interoperability and Standards

Uffe Kock Wiil, The Danish National Centre for IT Research (CIT), Aarhus University, Denmark

12/22/2008
(Original Publish Date: 12/8/1997)

Open hypermedia technology is currently showing its potential for building hypermedia authoring and browsing environments encompassing existing, widely used applications such as Microsoft Word on Windows platforms and Emacs on Unix platforms. The ultimate goal is to introduce hypermedia technology into as many applications and components of existing computing environments as possible to evolve gradually current computing environments into a world-wide, unified hypermedia environment spanning multiple computing platforms. A significant step towards this rewarding and ambitious goal is to introduce open hypermedia standards that allow interoperability between the many small hypermedia environments that make up the global hypermedia environment. The contributions of this special issue address the concerns of application developers who design applications and system developers who design hypermedia environments. The issue presents a snapshot of the ongoing effort in the open hypermedia community to define common guidelines and standards for interoperation between open hypermedia environments