Fusing the World Wide Web and the open hypermedia system technologies

An important goal of our research is to provide hypertext to hypertext-unaware dynamically-mapped information systems (DMIS) with minimal or no change to DMISs. Our research provides a systematic dynamic-mapping mechanism for mapping display outputs from DMISs to hypertext constructs and a set of guidelines for DMIS integration on the WWW and with open hypermedia systems (OHS). In this dissertation, we propose an OHS framework. One major function of this framework is to classify and evaluate hypermedia systems and OHSs. Another is to help designers specify their own OHSs, either from scratch or by incorporating existing systems. Because the WWW seems to be the major interface and development environment in the future, and because all users will have access to it (through the Internet or Intranets), we have adopted the WWW as the backbone of our system architecture. Our system architecture combines the features of both the WWW and the open hypermedia systems and conforms to our OHS conceptual architecture. Those features include integration, distribution, across platforms, collaboration, and separation of links from documents. We intend to build a prototype that will implement the proposed hybrid architecture and meet the application requirements of our OHS framework as much as possible. This will enable us to adopt merits of both the WWW and the OHS technologies.