My colleague Bob Parkinson, who is involved in technical liaison with
Project Liberation (see Lorcan Dempsey's recent post), has provided
the following notes on Hyper-G.
Dick Chamberlain
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We are invloved in a Hyper-G project with the development team. The
project is Liberation and is to examine the use of
Hyper-G to deliver information within libraries.
I have spent some time over the last few months 'playing' with Hyper-G
and some of its asociated components. As pointed out the management of
link integrity is a positive asset. This is a feature of the database
that is at the heart of the system. The fact that you have a centralised
database, means that you can quickly and easily restructure information
trees, its almost (but not quite) point, click and drag, without having
to worry about URL integrity. This is a lot better than moving files
about on a server with unix mv's, for example.
The Harmony (Hyper-G Unix client) also provides something called the
session manager. This is a separate window that provides a 'file tree like
structure', that provides some context for the document you are examiming,
and that you can use to navigate about an information tree. Similar features
are available in the Windows PC client, Amadeus.
Futher, the team from Graz, the developers, offer a WWW gateway, that
allows a Hyper-G server to support normal web clients.
I examined the use of Hyper-G to author and serve some new library web
pages. The downside, from my point of view, was the use of another SGML
derived markup language (HTF), that lacked many of the features that we
wanted to use. However the developers have announced that they will be
dropping their HTF markup code, and supporting HTML directly in future.
As mentioned above PC clients and Unix clients are available. In the UK from;
ftp://unix.hensa.ac.uk/mirrors/Hyper-G
There is also a Hyper-G newsgroup, comp.infosystems.hyperg
Bob
[log in to unmask]
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University of Nottingham Library Network Group.
Research Assistant: Networked Information
Technical Officer: OMNI project
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There must be some kind of way out of here,
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