Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Semantic Web: Hypertext to Hypermedia and Beyond...

It is frequently questioned how hypermedia relates to hypertext.

Nelson defined hypertext in his 1965 paper ‘Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate’. In that paper Nelson states that the prefix ‘hyper’ is an ‘extension and generality’ used to signify non-linear media. There is no pre-determined path through non-linear media, unlike traditional linear media (e.g. a book). He also defines ‘hyperfilm’. ‘“Hyperfilm” and “hypertext” are characterised as “new media”... the larger category in which at least the hyperfilm is included is “hypermedia”’, (Wardrip-Fruin 2004).

Wardrip-Fruin points out that Nelson concluded in 1970’s “No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks”, (Reprinted in ‘The New Media Reader’), that ‘hypertext began as a term for forms of hypermedia (human-authored media that “branch or perform on request”) that operate textually’, (Wardrip-Fruin 2004).

In 1992, Nelson wrote in ‘Literary Machines’:

‘By now the word “hypertext” has become generally accepted for branching and responding text, but the corresponding word “hypermedia”, meaning complexes of branching and responding graphics, movies and sound –as well as text – is much less used. Instead they use the strange term “interactive multimedia” – four syllables longer, and not expressing the idea that it extends hypertext’, (Nelson 1992).

We can therefore conclude, without doubt, that ‘hypertext’ is a sub-set of the larger category ‘hypermedia’.

Lowe et al, (1998) define a hypermedia application as:

‘An application which uses associative relationships among information contained within multiple media data for the purpose of facilitating access to, and manipulation of, the information encapsulated by the data’.

Lowe et al describe websites as hypermedia applications and the World Wide Web as a hypermedia system.

Hypertext and hypermedia systems would have struggled without the innovations of Douglas Engelbart.

Doug Engelbart had been working on office automation at the Stanford Research Instituted since the late 1950s. In 1962 he wrote a paper entitled ‘Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework’, (Englebart 1962). This led to the formation of the Augmentation Research Centre (ARC). The ARC primarily worked on the development of the NLS, (‘oN-Line System’), which was the first system to use hyperlinks. The NLS was finished and demoed in 1968, in what has been termed ‘The Mother of All Demos’, (Levy 2000). Engelbart also invented the mouse, which was patented in 1970, (Wikipedia 2009).

In 1967 Andries Van Dam and Ted Nelson began working on the Hypertext Editing System at Brown University, (Dam 1988). It enabled the use of Instances:

‘Instances are references, so that if you changed, for example, a piece of legal boilerplate that was referenced in multiple places, the change would show up in all the places that referenced it’, (Dam 1988).

In 1968 they created FRESS (File Retrieval and Editing System):

‘The most popular feature... FRESS was the first system to have an undo. We saved every edit in a shadow version of the data structure, and that allowed us to do both an autosave and an undo. I think the most important feature in an system built today has to be an indefinite undo and redo’, (Dam 1988).

This is still something we should strive for today.

After NLS and HES came Xerox PARC’s Notecards and Carnegie Mellon’s ZOG, (that used a ‘card’ model to display data).

The first hypermedia system (media, not just text) was the Aspen Movie Map, created in 1977.

In the early 1980s, Shneiderman’s TIES and Brown University’s Intermedia were popular.

In 1980 Tim Berners-Lee begun work on ENQUIRE, which would eventually develop into the Web itself. Other hypermedia systems that were popular up until the advent of the web included Guide and Hypercard.

• Dam, A.V., 1988. Hypertext '87: keynote address. Commun. ACM, 31(7), 887-895. Available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/48511.48519 [Accessed 25 February 2009].
• Engelbart, D. C., 1962. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Available from: http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html [Accessed 25 February 2009].
• Levy, S., 2000. Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything Reissue., Penguin Books.
• Lowe, D. & Hall, W., 1998. Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach, John Wiley & Sons.
• Nelson, T. H., 1965. Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate. In: Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, August 24-26, 1965, Cleveland, Ohio, United States. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 84-100. Available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/800197.806036 [Accessed 08 January 2009].
• Nelson, T. H., 1992. Literary Machines. CA, USA: Mindful Press.
• Wardrip-Fruin, N., 2004. What Hypertext Is. In: Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, August 09 - 13, 2004, Santa Cruz, CA, USA. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 126-127. Available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1012807.1012844 [Accessed 09 February 2009].
• Wikipedia, 2009. Douglas Engelbart. Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbart [Accessed February 25, 2009].
• Wikipedia, 2009. Hypertext. Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext [Accessed 09 February 2009].
• Wikipedia, 2009. NLS (computer system). Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system) [Accessed 25 February 2009].