Hypertext2007 Wendy Hall - "Whatever Happened to Hypertext?"

Professor Wendy HallUniversity of Southampton

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~wh

Whatever happened to hypertext?

“As we may think”

Vannevar Bush

Atlantic Monthly July 1945

Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart

Everything is deeply intertwingled

Augmenting human intellect

Hypertext Conference Series

• 1987 was a big year for hypertext. Apple launched HyperCard

• First ACM Hypertext Conference – HT’87, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

• ACM HT’89, Pittsburgh• Key feature was interdisciplinary nature of the

conferences – authors and poets as well as techies

• Systems around at the time included KMS, NoteCards, Guide, Intermedia, Microcosm, Hyper-G and the embyronic Web

ECHT’90

Fountain et al“Microcosm: an open model for hypermedia

with dynamic linking” Proceedings of ECHT’90

Microcosm Linkbases

Link database

Documents

Note the direction of this arrow!

Separable hyperstructure

Links in Microcosm

source, destination, description

source: object | concept | context

Focus on associative linking

Different linkbases for different users

We generated links based on metadata description of documents in docuverse

and “it all falls out”

ACM Hypertext’91

The rise and fall of the Hypertext conference series

• ECHT’92, Italy

• ACM HT’93, Seattle – peak of attendance figures, big commercial exhibition, half the demo’s are Web

• ECHT’94 (merged with ECHT), Edinburgh – Tim is keynote speaker (NB: WWW1, May 1994, Geneva)

• ACM HT’96, Washington DC

• ACM HT’97 (merged with ECHT), Southampton – 150 attendees, cf. 2,000+ attendees at WWW6 in California

• Hypertext conferences in terminal decline (almost!)

Web conference series begins• WWW1 – May 1994, Geneva• WWW2 – October 1994, Chicago

• WWW3 – April 1995, Darmstadt• WWW4 – December 1995, Boston

• WWW5 – 1996, Paris

• WWW6 – 1997, Santa Clara, California. Paper accepted for conference that “reinvents” Microcosm generic links – index-based hyperlinks. Schedule clash with HT’97 in Southampton. Joint panel. Quote from Ted “Your future is my past”.

• WWW7 – 1998, Australia. Annual WWW conference rotates between US, Europe and ROW. I join IW3C2.

• Hypertext track established at WWW conferences

Lessons learnt:

Big is beautiful: the network is everything (tbl)

Scruffy works: let the links fail to make it scale (tbl)

But we lost (for a time) conceptual and contextual linking

Creating good hypertext in the Web is ironically very hard

Missing links – search engines fill the gap

Ending the Tyranny of the Link

“We need to develop a new conception of hypermedia that includes non-network structures as well as virtual structures on an equal footing with network structures.”

Halasz, HT’91

A query is anunresolved link

The Proxy DLS

DLS Agent

client

Link server

Internet

The DLS Agent is an HTTP proxy that inserts links on-the-fly by querying the link service

XML XLink XPointer

Open Hypermedia Systems community influence on the Web?

What happened to contextual and conceptual linking?

COHSEImproving the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of

Web documents using ontologies.

Artificial Intelligence

The Semantic Web

Semantic Web LayerCake (Berners-Lee, 99;Swartz-Hendler, 2001)

The Semantic Web:A Web of Data

Person URI: http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1650Role URI: http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/role/1650

Person RDF: http://rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1650Role RDF: http://rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/role/1650Internal Person RDF: http://intra.rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1650Internal Role RDF: http://intra.rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/role/1650More information

Everything is deeply intertwingled!

3/05/2006

An Introduction

Aims and Ambitions 03/05/2006

Technical Architecture

- semantic store scalable to 60Bn triples

WWWWWW

Semi-structured dataSemi-structured data

Front EndFront End

Unstructured dataUnstructured data

Structured Structured

datadata

JXTJXT

(f)(f)

JXT merge (e)JXT merge (e)

RDS (d)RDS (d)NPS (c)NPS (c)

Ranked Searchable Ranked Searchable

Segment (b)Segment (b)

URLs (a)URLs (a)

Natural Language EngineeringNatural Language Engineering

Harvested Harvested

PagesPages

NUTCHNUTCH

Web 2.0

• Wiki’s• Blogs• Web services• Folksonomies• Flickr• YouTube• MySpace• Second Life?

Blogosphere

Tomorrow the Semantic Web ( Web 3.0)

What will the social and policy implications be?

How do we start to answer these questions?

The Web Science Research Initiative

Creating a Science of the Web

November 2006

Directors: Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt, Southampton

Tim Berners-Lee, Daniel Weitzner, MIT

What is Web Science?

The Web has been transformational Largest human information construct in

history How are we to

Understand what it is Engineer its future Ensure its social benefit

This requires a new interdisciplinary field This field we call Web Science, or the

Science of Decentralized Information Systems

Web Science Involves

New ScienceNew EngineeringNew Social UnderstandingNew Capacity

Research Agenda

WSRI will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical and social challenge underlying the growth of the Web

Or particular interest is the volume of information on the Web that increasingly documents aspects of human activity and knowledge

WSRI research projects will weight questions such as:

How do we access information and assess its reliability? By what means may we assure its use complies with

social and legal rules? How will we preserve the Web over time?

Why this is important?

We cannot take for granted the freedom to exchange information that is at the heart of the Web

It has become our cultural legacy, our social heritage – we live in a web-dependent society in a web-dependent world

Protecting and preserving this freedom is a major challenge as big as any other global cause

If we don’t do this, who will?

This is as grand challenge and maybe an inconvenient truth!

www.webscience.org

•HT’07 Manchester – re-launch on series•WWW conference still going strong but has never attracted the hypertext crowd•The Semantic Web represents the re-birth of hypertext but the hypertext crowd won’t find much to interest them at ISWC and ESWC •The Web 2.0 conferences are too commercial?•Will we have to create a Web Science conference series?