The Hyper-G Network Information System

Abstract

As the Internet continues to experience exponential rates of growth, attention is shifting away from mainstream network services such as electronic mail and le transfer to more interactive information services. Current network information systems, whilst extremely successful, run into problems of fragmentation, consistency, scalability, and loss of orientation. The development of second generation" network information systems such as Hyper-G can help overcome these limitations. Of particular note are Hyper-G's tightly-coupled structuring, linking, and search facilities, its projection of a seamless information space across server boundaries with respect to each of these facilities, and its support for multiple languages. The Harmony client for Hyper-G utilises two and three-dimensional visualisations of the information space and couples location feedback to search and link browsing operations, in order to reduce the likelihood of disorientation. This paper presents a comprehensive o verview of Hyper-G and Harmony.

The World Wide Web, Hyper-G and Microcosm: Historical Analysis and Future Integration Directions

“…In 1993, Mosaic was developed by NCSA and was followed by the development of Internet Explorer and Netscape [1 and 8]. In contrast, viewing documents in Hyper-G was only available through Harmony viewers [1]. In addition, Microcosm restricts the access to its data by making it accessible using proprietary viewers developed by Microcosm's team only [6].…”

Turning the Web Into an Effective Knowledge Repository

“…Current solutions to the problem of referential integrity (Andrews et al, 1995;Ingham et al, 1996;Moreau and Gray, 1998) do not deal safely with dynamic content and are not complete, since they are not able to collect distributed cycles of unreachable web data.…”

“…Some previous work (Andrews et al, 1995;Creech, 1996;Kappe, 1995), while enforcing referential integrity to the web, impose custom-made (or customized) authoring, visualization or administration schemes. However, for transparency reasons and ease of deployment, it would be preferable to have a system that would enforce referential integrity on the web, to content providers and subscribers, in a mostly transparent manner, i.e., based solely on proxying with minor server and/or client extensions.…”

“…Hyper-G (Andrews et al, 1995;Kappe, 1995) is a "second-generation" hyper-media system that aims to correct web deficiencies and provide a rich set of new services and features. With regard to referential integrity, it is enforced using of a propagation algorithm that is described as scalable.…”

A context-based navigation paradigm for accessing Web data

“…Set-based hypermedia paradigms such as CHM [6], the HM-Data Model [7] and Hyper-G [8] equally provide inherent support for navigation in two orthogonal planes; inside a collection and across collection boundaries. Their current container and current member concepts are comparable to MESH's current context and current node respectively.…”