Enriching Hypermedia on the Web
Bernard Roper
Web Science Institute
University of Southampton
b.a.roper@soton.ac.uk
Abstract
We examine Microcosm and Hyper-G, contemporaries of the
World Wide Web. We compare the three systems the reasons the
world Wide Web became dominant, also noting that the simplicity
of the web has fostered developments that are leading to much
richer hypermedia systems. We explore two of these: augmented
reality and the semantic web.
1. Introduction
At the start of the 1980’s, Hypermedia systems mostly existed on
LANs or discs. Their scope was institutional and although many
realised their growth potential, people still thought in terms of
thousands of documents. As the Internet grew in importance, so did
the potential for sharing links across systems and networks and the
concept of open hypermedia systems which [6]:
 do not impose mark-up on data making it inaccessible to
other platforms
 integrate with any tool running under the host OS
 work across different platforms and over networks
 do not distinguish authors and readers
 are extensible
By 1991 hypermedia systems had begun to address issues of
scalability and openness. This report examines three of the most
important: Hyper-G, Microcosm and the World Wide Web (W3),
exploring the reasons why W3 dominated despite lacking many of
the features of the other two. We also look at how those reasons led
to developments which promise richer hypermedia architectures in
the future.
2. Hypermedia systems
2.1 Hyper-G
Hyper-G was a user-client application with more advanced features
than W3. It shipped with a viewer called Harmony, a built in
database, authentication system, multi-language and multimedia
support. Its navigation tools used three strategies:
Search, built in, with all documents indexed as part of the upload
process[2].
Linking, using bi-directional links, stored in a database (linkbase),
rather than in documents allowed a richer, more robust architecture.
Documents could be linked to without being edited and bi-
directionality allowed identification of incoming links which could
be updated if a document was deleted or renamed, avoiding
‘hanging links’ and 404 errors. Link integrity was maintained as
part of the edit/import process [2].
Structure, documents were arranged in collections, which could
span multiple servers and were displayed hierarchically in a system
map in the session viewer. Collections could be linked to other
collections or documents. The linkbase allowed computation of
local (fisheye) views to orientate the user by displaying links local
to their context[2].
Unlike W3, the client used a single, stateful connection to a single
Hyper-G server, which handled authentication, permissions,
sessions and content caching. It also handled requests to additional
servers, acting as a client proxy[7].
The client had several components. The base process was the
session manager which handled the server connection and
navigation, using document viewers to display video, various image
formats and text. Hyper-G’s SGML based text format HTF was
similar to HTML, which allowed it to process http requests and
render html representations of resources for W3 clients [1]. This
and the ability to store pointers to documents on other systems gave
it some degree of openness, but it was still closed in that it relied
on files being imported and offered limited capabilities for
independent applications.
2.2 Microcosm
Microcosm consisted of a set of autonomous processes interacting
using Microcosm’s messaging system. The document control
system received messages from a viewer, usually in response to user
input. The message was sent to the filter manager which passed it
through various filters which determined the action required. The
most important was the linkbase filter which would determine the
anchor source, generating a message back to the document control
system to send the destination document to the viewer to display
the destination anchor [6]. Like Hyper-G, it stored links an external
linkbase rather than in documents. Unlike Hyper-G and W3 it was
capable of processing richer N-ary links [10].
It was conceived as an open system; although there were native
content viewers, Microcosm was designed to add hypermedia
capabilities to any application. Applications were either fully
Microcosm aware, i.e. belonging to the Microcosm Suite or
partially aware, i.e. capable of being extended to use Microcosm
links, e.g. Microsoft Word could be extended using macros [8].
Other applications without these capabilities could use ‘clipboard
linking’ where the content was copied to the clipboard then sent to
microcosm to interrogate the link base[6]. Although this does not
allow linking to locations within documents it is still a powerful
feature, giving Microcosm an unrivalled degree of openness. This
is a crucial principle behind Microcosm: the notion of hypermedia
as a link service, able to work within any application [8].
2.3 The World Wide Web (W3)
The W3 is a sparser system. One-way links, embedded in files are
created using HTML anchor tags containing a destination
reference, which can be external or in the same document. W3 is
driven by open standards: html, the document format and http, the
protocol used to request and deliver the destination document.
Because these standards were made freely available at the outset,
the W3 could be accessed by anyone with a modem, computer and
(free) web browser software. Using a text editor and a modest
learning effort anyone could create servers and content. This low
entry cost was crucial to W3’s success and ensured that it was taken
up rapidly and became the de-facto hypermedia system.
W3 is, in essence, a sparse, closed hypermedia, lacking the rich
architectural features of Microcosm and Hyper-G. Its strength is in
that sparsity. The others required a substantial investment from the
user in terms of financial outlay and effort required. The server
infrastructure requirements for Hyper-g and Microcosm
implementations also impose costs that would have inhibited
growth long before the scale of today’s web had been reached [9].
W3, although inferior in many respects, was accessible by anyone
willing to type a simple term into a search box and click on links.
Apart from internet access it required no financial outlay so could
be used for the most ‘trivial’ of reasons.
The sparsity of W3s architecture has also allowed enhancements to
emerge; e.g. Wikis providing authoring capabilities and bi-
directional linking [18]. Parallels exist between between software
and hypermedia engineering as both involve the creation and
maintenance of complex, interdependent and interlinked systems
[10]. In software engineering, a principle of Object Oriented design
is that objects should be ‘closed for alteration, open for extension
[11]. The way in which the web has snowballed and gained a
multitude of extensions to the simple concept of tagged documents
and http, to produce a phenomenon that is far richer than anyone
imagined in 1991 is an embodiment of this principle.
3. The Future
The Hypermedia systems discussed so far all deal with links
between documents, whether they be video, image or text. More
recent developments are changing this paradigm and links are
increasingly connecting data, places and events. Two examples
follow.
3.1 Augmented Reality (AR)
The first experiments with Augmented Reality began in the 1960s
[17] and by the early 90s experiments with hypermedia enabled AR
were underway [16]. Smartphones removed the need for bulky
equipment as these devices, equipped with GPS, cameras and
motion sensors use the ‘magic lens metaphor’ to explore the world
through the camera view [5].
AR allows links with places and objects, mostly as endpoints, using
computer vision, GPS coordinates or, increasingly with a fusion of
these techniques to allow accurate device localisation [15].
Emerging standards such as ARML as well as use of operating
system features also allow source anchor creation e.g. accessing
links by entering a location, and make it possible to form links with
events, adding a temporal dimension to hypermedia [12].
3.2 Semantic Web (SW)
One limitation of html is that although it is good at presenting
human readable data, that data is obscured when machines search
the web [4]. A page containing the phrase “Fido is a fluffy kitten.”
can only be found by searching for those key words. Searching for
“young cats” would be fruitless because the meaning of kitten is
provided by the human user, not the web page.
After the release of W3, Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a future web
of linked data, starting a paradigm shift away from a web of
documents to the web as a graph database [3]. Work began on web
standards to allow the sharing of data and machine readable
understanding of its meaning: Resource Description Framework is
a data model used to describe URI resources as triples in the format
subject– predicate –object. Expressing our earlier statement about
Fido using RDF: Fido is the subject, is a would be the predicate
and kitten the object. Fido, is a, and kitten can also form different
parts of other triples, which could describe where Fido lives, and
who feeds him [14]. Other standards in the RDF family include
SPARQL: a set of standards for querying and manipulating data
stored as RDF triples, and Web Ontology Language (OWL), which
adds rich ontologies, encoding domain vocabularies, designed to
encode taxonomies of knowledge, promoting interoperability
across domains and facilitating access to knowledge for
machines[13]. It allows inferences about Fido based on linked
knowledge about cats.
The semantic web promises the ability to create links to knowledge
and reasoning. Tim Berners-Lee give the example of a search for a
business card which, given RTF encoded knowledge of the
necessary ingredients, can infer one purely from that knowledge
[4]. This form of emergent link enables a hypermedia architecture
far richer than anything that has gone before.
4. Conclusions
In this report we have examined three important hypermedia
systems from the dawn of the web in 1991. We have compared their
features and found that W3, although inferior in many respects,
dominated, due to its simplicity and low entry costs. Its sparsity has
turned out to be a strength, because it allowed enhancements to
emerge and be added. Instead of trying to predict requirements and
cater for them at the outset, the web had the simplicity and
extensibility to respond to society’s needs as they arose, allowing
the continuing collective construction of a truly World Wide Web.
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