Hypermedia

The hypermedia sub-group undertakes research in theories, standards, and technologies for open hypermedia, advanced Web-technology and more recently ubiquitous and mobile hypermedia.

In the early days of participatory design a lot of the prototyping work was conducted using HyperCard tools on Apple Macintosh. This work and inspired a focus on hypermedia technologies and applications within the group.

The hypermedia subgroup was founded during the visit of one of the pioneer hypertext researchers Randy Trigg from Xerox PARC. Randy Trigg and Kaj Grønbæk, started programming the Devise Hypermedia (DHM) system in the Mjølner Beta System in 1991. The DHM system was based on an object oriented implementation of the Dexter Hypertext Reference Model. DHM was developed as part of the EuroCoOp/EuroCODE EU-projects, where the focus was on supporting collaboration among engineers at the Great Belt Ltd.

The work with engineers at the Great Belt Ltd. inspired a focus on developing non-monolithic hypermedia systems that integrate the users’ favourite tools. This work and parallel work at mainly the University of Southampton lead to the formulation of an approach to hypermedia which was called Open Hypermedia, and an international open hypermedia working group was formed.

The Århus hypermedia group has been very active in both the ACM Hypertext community (SigWEB) and the later W3C Web conferences. The Århus group has had paper contributions on every ACM Hypertext conference since 1992, and every Web conference since 1998. In 1996, Grønbæk and Trigg’s paper was nominated for the Engelbart Award and in 1997, Grønbæk, Bouvin and Sloth won the Engelbart best paper award on a paper about approaches to design of Dexter-based open hypermedia for the WWW.

In 1999 Grønbæk and Trigg published the book From Web to Workplace: Designing Open Hypermedia on MIT Press.

During the years 1998-2000, the hypermedia group conducted a large CIT project COCONUT together the Danish Telco TDC Internet. This project developed a number different open hypermedia tools and infrastructures for augmenting the Web with open hypermedia, including Bouvin’s Arakne and the infrastructure Construct developed mainly by Wiil and Nürnberg.

In year 2000 a company called Hypergenic was formed to commercialize parts of the COCONUT project’s results. The company is currently in business and sells products and consultancy for company intranets, knowledge management, help desks, e-learning etc.

Since then the open hypermedia work has continued in a number of different directions beyond the traditional navigational hypermedia concept. There has been developments in the area of 2D and 3D spatial hypermedia e.g. in the WorkSPACE project. Also concepts like physical hypermedia and mobile hypermedia have been explored and supported with open hypermedia tools. Finally, Peer-2- Peer based architectures for hypermedia is being investigated in a new project that recently received funding from the Research Council for Technology and Production.

See this map for a map over different systems and central publications from the Århus Hypermedia group.