The term ÔhypermediaÕ covers a large range of different systems and embedded application facilities supporting organization and/or traversal of information chunks by means of associations or links. Such notion of information management based on browsable linked chunks of text and other media dates back to the 1940's. The term ÔmultimediaÕ only dates back to the late 80Õs, where it mainly covered research in HW/SW to handle sound, video, and animations, but lately the concept has broadened to cover almost the entire world of systems and applications supporting different media, thus including hypermedia. In the course we will explore basic concepts, history, and current state of the art of hypermedia and multimedia systems. Readings will include landmark papers by Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and Ted Nelson who coined the ideas of what we know as hypermedia and multimedia today. We will read about some of the early groundbreaking multi/hypermedia systems (e.g. Augment, Xanadu, ZOG, Intermedia, NoteCards, KMS). We will also look into current developments in hypermedia and multimedia on the Internet (e.g. WWW, JAVA, VRML, Hyper-G and MBONE). Finally, we will focus on current research in cooperative and open hypermedia (e.g. DEVISE Hypermedia, MicroCosm, SEPIA). It will be possible for course participants to get hands-on experience with some of the systems being discussed. The course will be organized around a kernel of mandatory papers, but there will also be room for a selection of special topics depending on the interests of the class, e.g: hypermedia process and data models: multi/hypermedia database issues (relational vs. object-oriented databases); multi/hypermedia user interfaces, e.g. cooperation aspects and Virtual Reality aspects; problems of browsing and searching large hypermedia structures; multimedia document models (e.g. SGML/HyTime, OLE2, OpenDoc); multi/hypermedia rhetoric; specific application domains of multi/hypermedia (e.g. education, medicine, system development or engineering).
Lecturer: Kaj Grønbæk
Evaluation: Commuted: active participation plus a written report or a seminar with notes
Readings: Papers
Prerequisites: