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Back to the Future: Bringing Original Hypermedia and Cross-Media Concepts to Modern Desktop Environments

Published: 29 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Over the last few decades, we have seen massive improvements in computing power, but nevertheless we still rely on digital documents and file systems that were originally created by mimicking the characteristics of physical storage media with all its limitations. This is quite surprising given that even before the existence of the computer, Information Science visionaries such as Vannevar Bush described more powerful information management solutions. We therefore aim to improve the way information is managed in modern desktop environments by embedding a hypermedia engine offering rich hypermedia and cross-media concepts at the level of an operating system. We discuss the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel as a candidate for realising such a general hypermedia engine and highlight its flexibility based on a number of domain-specific applications that have been developed over the last two decades. The underlying content repository will no longer rely on monolithic files, but rather contain a user's data in the form of content fragments, such as snippets of text or images, which are structurally linked to form the corresponding documents, and can be reused in other documents or even shared across computers. By increasing the scope to a system-wide hypermedia engine, we have to deal with fundamental challenges related to granularity, interoperability or context resolving. We strongly believe that computing technology has evolved enough to revisit and address these challenges, laying the foundation for a wide range of innovative use cases for efficiently managing cross-media content in modern desktop environments.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Harnessing Hypertext Paradigms to Augment VR SpacesProceedings of the 7th Workshop on Human Factors in Hypertext10.1145/3679058.3688633(1-10)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
  • (2024)As We May Interact: Challenges and Opportunities for Next-Generation Human-Information InteractionProceedings of the 7th Workshop on Human Factors in Hypertext10.1145/3679058.3688629(1-2)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Hypermedia Controls: Feral to FormalProceedings of the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3648188.3675127(52-64)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024

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  1. Back to the Future: Bringing Original Hypermedia and Cross-Media Concepts to Modern Desktop Environments

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HT '21: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    August 2021
    306 pages
    ISBN:9781450385510
    DOI:10.1145/3465336
    • General Chair:
    • Owen Conlan,
    • Program Chair:
    • Eelco Herder
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 29 August 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. cross-media spaces
    2. file management
    3. hypermedia
    4. hypertext

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    HT '21
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    HT '21: 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    August 30 - September 2, 2021
    Virtual Event, USA

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Harnessing Hypertext Paradigms to Augment VR SpacesProceedings of the 7th Workshop on Human Factors in Hypertext10.1145/3679058.3688633(1-10)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
    • (2024)As We May Interact: Challenges and Opportunities for Next-Generation Human-Information InteractionProceedings of the 7th Workshop on Human Factors in Hypertext10.1145/3679058.3688629(1-2)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Hypermedia Controls: Feral to FormalProceedings of the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3648188.3675127(52-64)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024

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