Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essentially the story of the Microcosm hypermedia research and development project that started in the late 1980's and from which has emerged a philosophy that re-examines the whole concept of hypermedia and its role in the evolution of multimedia information systems. The book presents the complete story of Microcosm to date. It sets the development of Microcosm in the context of the history of the subject from which it evolved, as well as the developments in the wider world of technology over the last two decades including personal computing, high-speed communications, and the growth of the Internet. These all lead us towards a world of global integrated information environments: the publishing revolution of the 20th century, in principle making vast amounts of information available to anybody anywhere in the world.
Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach explains the role that open hypermedia systems and link services will play in the integrated information environments of the future. It considers issues such as authoring, legacy systems and data integrity issues, and looks beyond the simple hypertext model provided in the World Wide Web and other systems today to the world of intelligent information processing agents that will help us deal with the problems of information overload and maintenance.
Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach will be of interest to all those who are involved in designing, implementing and maintaining hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web by setting the groundwork for producing a system that is both easy to use and easy to maintain. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essential reading for anyone involved in the provision of online information.

Zusammenfassung
Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essentially the story of the Microcosm hypermedia research and development project that started in the late 1980's and from which has emerged a philosophy that re-examines the whole concept of hypermedia and its role in the evolution of multimedia information systems.

Inhalt
Motivations.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 How We Started.- 1.3 Why Microcosm?.- 1.4 The Vision.- A Brief History of Hypermedia.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 The Original Vision.- 2.3 Hypermedia for Personal Computers.- 2.4 Standards for Hypertext Systems and Information Exchange.- 2.5 Hypertext on the Internet.- 2.6 Open Hypermedia Systems and Link Services.- 2.7 Conclusions.- Implementing Open Hypermedia: Microcosm.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Overview.- 3.3 The Link Service Model.- 3.4 Interacting with the Information: Viewers.- 3.5 Processing the Information: Filters.- 3.6 Linking the Information: Creating Links.- 3.7 Storing the Information: Document Management.- 3.8 Controlling the Information: The Registry.- 3.9 Finding the Information.- 3.10 Summary.- Making Open Hypermedia Work.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Working with Third Party Applications.- 4.3 Working with Multimedia.- 4.4 Working with Changeable Data.- Authoring with Open Hypermedia.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 General Principles: Building a Resource-Base.- 5.3 Authoring Applications within a Resource-Base.- 5.4 Applications.- 5.5 Summary.- Working with the Web and Distributed Systems.- 6.1 Introduction.- 6.2 Accessing the Web from Microcosm.- 6.3 Exporting Microcosm Datasets to the Web.- 6.4 Putting Microcosm into the Web.- 6.5 Distributed Microcosm.- The Future.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Concept Authoring and CSCW.- 7.3 Mavis.- 7.4 Agents.- 7.5 Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing.- 7.6 Ending the Tyranny of the Button.- 7.7 Conclusions.- Glossary of Microcosm Terms.- A: A Declarative Model for Microcosm.- B: Microcosm 3.1.1: The Commercial Version.