This workshop takes a cross-disciplinary approach to implementing hypermedia as value-added support functionality. We consider the entire process of embedding hypertext functions into non-hypertext oriented information systems. These include a large base of scientific and business applications, which dynamically generate their content, and which people use primarily for their underlying analytic functionality. Hypertext features both supplement and give users access to the application's primary activities.
Introduction
Theme of the workshop
Issues for discussion
Proposed activities and agenda
Participants
Submissions
Accepted Position Papers
Primary Contact
Organizers
This paper presents details of the second workshop on incorporating hypertext functionality (HTF) into software systems to be held in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext '96 conference in Washington D.C.
The first workshop of this series was held in conjunction with the ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technologies (ECHT '94). This workshop was very successful, and was reported in the SIGLINK newsletter. A final report was compiled from the minutes of the workshop. This report and the position papers were issued as Technical Report #95-10 by the Institute for Integrated Systems Research at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
At the conclusion of the first workshop, it was agreed that many new issues had been raised and that future developments might change the solutions proposed to the issues discussed. Hence a follow-up workshop is being held in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext '96 conference to address these new issues, and discuss recent developments pertinent to the topics of the previous workshop.
The primary theme of this workshop is to investigate methods of providing hypertext functionality to users of information systems. This includes providing hypertext functionality to systems that lack it, as well as providing enhanced hypertext functionality to systems which have only limited hypertext capabilities.
This workshop will emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to addressing the problems of supporting hypertext functionality for legacy applications and databases, and other systems that dynamically generate their content, offering support for differing user requirements. Our aim is to bring together researchers from a number of relevant fields, including management information systems, systems analysis, design and development, distributed systems, open hypermedia systems, and the World Wide Web, in order to bring a variety of perspectives to address these problems. This cross-disciplinary environment will foster the exchange of useful ideas and promote collaboration between researchers in different fields. One important goal of the workshop is to identify common research interests and to promote subsequent collaboration and cooperation among participants.
Most end-users are reluctant to abandon their current non-hypertext oriented systems in favor of systems providing hypertext functionality. If the majority of users are going to benefit from hypertext functionality, it must be incorporated within the everyday information systems they use with a minimal amount of effort by designers and developers. Thus, as a field, we must look towards augmenting with hypertext functionality the myriad of today's personal, scientific and business systems, which were not designed specifically as hypertext oriented. This should result in new ways to view a system's knowledge and processes conceptually, to navigate among items of interest and analysis stages, to enhance system knowledge with comments and relationships, and to target information displays to individual users and their tasks.
This workshop will focus on hypertext and hypermedia as value-added support functionality, and on the entire process of embedding hypertext functions into non-hypertext oriented information systems. These include a large base of scientific and business applications that people use primarily for their underlying analytic functionality, i.e., not for reading or navigating among large amounts of display information. Hypertext features both supplement and give users access to the application's primary activities. For many of these systems, hypertext will be integrated so seamlessly that users will be unaware of its presence.
Hypertext links and functionality may be implemented both within an information systems application (intra-application HTF) and externally at the operating systems level (extra-application HTF). Intra-application HTF involves the management of links by the same engine which is responsible for the storage and display of the information being linked. In extra-application HTF, the hypertext functionality is orthogonal to the storage and display functionality. Extra-application HTF often is provided by external hypertext engines or functionality within the operating system. Each of the two approaches has advantages and both could be used successfully to integrate hypertext functionality into non-hypertext systems. There is currently a trend from intra-application HTF to extra-application HTF, represented, in part by open hypermedia systems (OHS).
Most OHS work to date concentrates on providing extra-application HTF to information systems applications. The information system is usually involved only in the final display of information and links, while the OHS is responsible for finding or creating links. However, the resources of many external applications, including the displaying application itself, can and should be drawn upon to create links. This is especially important when links are dynamically generated based on an application's internal data structures. Extra-application HTF includes OHS, but also addresses the dynamic generation of links from heterogeneous sources.
Some of the topics to be discussed in this workshop will be of interest to participants in the Second Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems as well. We will be encouraging discussions between participants of both workshops, especially at the informal dinner and in a Birds of a Feather session.
This workshop will last two days, starting at 0900 and concluding at 1730. Participants will be encouraged to continue discussions informally. An informal dinner on the first evening will foster this aim. Pre-workshop activities will include the distribution of the position papers of all invited participants, who will be expected to have read them before the workshop. Discussion topics will be finalised after assessing the contributions of the invited participants. A draft agenda is :
09:00 Introduction to the workshop; introduce each participant
09:45 Issue 1: Introductory Discussion on Intra-Application and
Extra-Application HTF
10:45 Coffee break
11:00 Issue 2: Incorporating Intra-Application HTF
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Issue 3: Incorporating Extra-Application HTF
15:45 Coffee break
16:00 Issue 4: Compatibility of Intra-Application and
Extra-Application HTF Approaches
17:30 Close of day's proceedings.
19:00 Informal dinner
09:00 Issue 5: Retrofitting Existing Systems
10:45 Coffee break
11:00 Issue 6: Integrating HTF in Distributed Computing Environments
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Issue 7: Fostering Widespread Acceptance of Hypertext
15:45 Coffee break
16:00 Issues arising from earlier discussion.
Future research directions and possible collaborative work.
17:30 Workshop close
Post-workshop activities will include the reporting of the outcomes of the workshop. A final report taken from the minutes of the meeting will be compiled and disseminated via the SIGLINK newsletter and Web pages. The position papers and final report will be published electronically on the New Jersey Institute of Technology Web server, and will also appear as a NJIT technical report.
The number of participants is ideally not more than twenty. The aim is to have representatives from all relevant hypertext research and development areas, and to promote discussion between the different research groups on topics of mutual interest.
Researchers and developers from many areas will be able to contribute and benefit from the discussions. Distributed systems researchers will contribute an understanding of the potential of distributed systems to support future hypermedia systems with ready-made security and communications software. In turn, they will benefit by finding out the state of the art in informaion systems-oriented hypermedia research and understanding the special requirements that hypertext functionality may have in a distributed environment. Open hypermedia systems researchers will be able to contribute by briefing participants on recent developments in interfacing hypermedia systems to external display applications, while benefiting from discussing the requirements of extra-application HTF. World Wide Web researchers will be able to contribute by briefing participants on advanced Web research into interfacing legacy databases via Common Gateway Interface scripts and into handling distributed information collections. They will benefit from discovering alternative approaches to interfacing legacy applications, while adequately representing and supporting the differing needs of users. Information systems developers will be able to contribute by characterizing the requirements of system integration and users. They will benefit from discussions with other researchers about issues influencing system integration.
Please submit a position paper of between 3-5 pages in length to the primary contact. Emailed submissions in RTF, HTML, any of the Microsoft Word formats, Postscript or plain ASCII are welcome. Each position paper will be refereed and results emailed to authors. Authors of accepted papers may be asked to make some small changes and a final version submitted to the primary contact. The final versions of all accepted papers will be bound into a workshop proceedings which will be mailed to participants before the workshop.
Important dates are :
Deadline for submissions to primary contact: January 12, 1996
Notification to authors: January 22, 1996
Deadline for revised versions of accepted papers: February 5, 1996
Workshop proceedings to be mailed: February 12, 1996
Workshop: March 16 and 17, 1996
Primary Contact: Helen Ashman joined the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation in 1989, to work on hypermedia information systems. Her interests include modelling of hypermedia concepts, hypermedia developments in the World Wide Web and hypermedia integration in distributed systems. She is co-editor of the Technical Futures theme for the forthcoming AusWeb 96 conference. Helen is a doctoral student at the Collaborative Information Technology Research Institute of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
V. Balasubramanian ("Bala") is President of E-Papyrus, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the areas of hypermedia, web-based document delivery, document management, groupware and user interface design. Most recently, he was instrumental in introducing Web-based information services at Hoffmann-La Roche, a pharmaceutical company. Prior to this, Bala has consulted for IBM, Bell Atlantic, and AT&T. He has been a presenter at other hypertext-related conferences. He recently participated in the redesign of SIGLINK's LINKBase using systematic hypermedia design principles. Bala is a doctoral student at Rutgers University.
Michael Bieber is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's CIS Department, where he directs the Hypermedia Information Systems Lab. He holds a JOVE Faculty Fellowship in the Automation Technology Section at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Michael is active in the ACM Hypertext conferences and co-chairs the Hypermedia in Information Systems "minitrack" at the annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. He also serves as the treasurer of ACM SIGLINK.
Harri Oinas-Kukkonen has eight years of experience with various aspects of hypermedia design and development in practice and research. Currently, he works as a researcher at the Finnish Academy, positioned at the University of Oulu in Finland. He is involved in the research of next generation CASE tools in the MetaPHOR project, where his research focuses on how CASE tools can be made more flexible for their users by hypermedia functionality. His work includes the incorporation of hypermedia functionality ( Linking Ability) to a metaCASE tool called MetaEdit+. His research interests also include usability engineering and method engineering.
This document is located at http://eies.njit.edu/~333/htf/htf2_cfp.html.
Last updated: February 20, 1996 by V. Balasubramanian