Introduction to SC3

Abstract

Hypermedia has been used to support a wide variety of user tasks. These tasks range from Bush’s association of information to more elaborate activities such as hyperfiction authoring and reading, information analysis and classification. Each of the tasks exemplifies how the human mind perceives structure in different problem domains. The identification of new problem domains is the main concern of hypermedia domain research. On the contrary, Hypermedia system research is focused on designing and building the computational foundations to support people working with structure concentrating especially on issues regarding openness. The Open Hypermedia movement originated from such an approach. Yet, the conceptual foundations of Open Hypermedia - its underlying structures and behaviors -have all focused on supporting one task: information navigation. As it has been shown, the abstractions provided by systems supporting information navigation cannot address issues in new domains (e.g. spatial and taxonomic) in a convenient and efficient way. These domains require conceptual foundations markedly different from those used to support navigational hypermedia manifesting, thus, a gap between hypermedia domain and system research. The need for delivering the tailored support required by different domains gave birth to Component Based Open Hypermedia Systems (CB-OHSs).