hypertext2007 wendy hall - "whatever happened to hypertext?"
DESCRIPTION
Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. This is the slides of the speak she gave after the Hypertext 2007 Dinner in Manchester, UK on the 11th September 2007. Visit http://www.ht07.org for more detailsTRANSCRIPT
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?