MICROCOSM: An Open Hypermedia Environment for Information Integration.

This report examines open hypermedia systems, and argues that such systems provide users with richer and more diverse ways to access and integrate information from large and dynamic data sets in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. 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 short comings of this model and identifies areas in which further work must be completed before such systems can become widely adopted, in particular the granularity of link anchors, editing, and version control. Possible solutions to these problems are presented and discussed.

Vision and Reality of Hypertext and GUIs: 2.1.13 Microcosm @mprove

Microcosm (cf. 2.1.13) is a research project at the University of Southampton. Like Intermedia five years before, Microcosm is designed around the idea that material of diverse sources and formats should be tied together into one hypertext. To achieve this goal links have to be separated from the documents. They are stored and maintained in special link databases. In contrast to Intermedia, Microcosm plays the active role in gathering the necessary data out of the documents. For each topic it stores data on which documents contain information about it and also where inside the documents the information is located. This elaborated conception of links can be seen more as a kind of Memex’ trails than simple one-to-one links. Given this structure dynamic linking becomes possible. This means that links can be associated with generic text strings. Wherever this string shows up a link is placed automatically. This has the effect that documents that are imported for the first time into Microcosm can have links immediately.