Introduction to SC2

Abstract

The hypermedia community has engaged in open hypermedia research for well over a decade. Open hypermedia is an approach to providing hypermedia services to multiple users over heterogeneous information managed by an open set of applications. However, the conceptual foundations of open hypermedia—its underlying structures and behaviors—have all focused on supporting one task: information navigation. While these structures are flexible enough to be applied to other domains, the mappings are often inefficient and unsatisfying. In fact, concurrent with open hypermedia research, several researchers were exploring domains such as spatial hypermedia and taxonomic hypermedia that required conceptual foundations markedly different from those used to support navigational hypermedia.