LinkWorks — Connecting Application Information Together —

Abstract

Most of today’s on-line information is organized differently foreach application. Worse yet, most existing applications have only limited ways of incorporating information from outside into their own world. This isolates tools from each other and makes cross-referencing difficult. It leads to ‘islands’ of information and prevents the user from linking related information.

Hyperlnformation services (LinkWorks) is a framework which uses the hypertext paradigm. The basic idea is to provide hypertext support for the end user, so that he is able to build his own networks of information using such daily applications as mail, calendar, cardfiler, and any other DECwin- dows applications which have been ‘hyperized’. The following sections describe the architecture and its basic components. An example shows the main operations used to build networks. A subsequent section gives a overview of how an existing application can easily be changed into a ‘hyperized’ tool.