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Introduction

 

Microcosm [1, 2, 3] is an open hypermedia research tool developed at Southampton University, originally for the MS-Windows environment. In Microcosm, the links are completely separated from the node information and they are stored in a database called linkbase. Basically, Microcosm can be split in two distinctive parts:

   figure14
Figure 1: Microcosm architecture

The communication between modules in Microcosm is made through messages. Messages [4] comprise basic ASCII text containing tags that summarise the action and parameters required. New messages can be created very easily without the need to recompile all the applications. Each filter registers the messages that it understands, so new messages and new functionalities can easily be incorporated. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the system.

Since Microcosm has been proved to be a successful hypermedia system, it has been ported both to the Unix environment and the Macintosh environment. The Unix version of Microcosm was implemented in C and C++, using Motif as graphical user interface (GUI) and currently runs on Silicon Graphics, Sun OS, LINUX. Communication between the different modules is implemented using sockets (Internet domain with stream style). Currently, the X-Windows version, although not complete is essentially a single user application. Although standard Microcosm has very good capabilities, the fact of being a single user application implies some limitations like no shared linkbase, no awareness information, etc. Currently, there are many projects that integrate CSCW with hypermedia applications. Both technologies are very powerful and complementary to each other. As a consequence this symbiosis seems to provide to end users the tools they really want [5]. Some examples of such integration are SEPIA [6], rIBIS [7], ABC [8, 9], Conversation Builder [10], AQUANET [11]. Our challenge was to integrate CSCW facilities with the Unix version of Microcosm, in order to support co-authoring facilities. For the particular example of co-authoring, the union of CSCW and hypermedia would allow users to cooperate with each other, exchange ideas rapidly, and through the use of hypermedia facilities create a sophisticated information structure that will be easier for readers to understand, and to review through the use of the facilities embedded into the hypermedia and CSCW applications.

Cooperative Microcosm goes beyond other cooperative hypermedia systems, since besides the cooperative environment provided, and the usual awareness information, it offers information retrieval tools and an open environment to help co-authoring. Co-authoring, as we will explain in section 3, brings basic problems for link authoring such as how authors know the node names created by other authors. This and other problems are easily solved in Microcosm for the following reasons:

The next section explains how CSCW facilities were integrated with Microcosm, the new requirements that emerged with this integration, and the functionalities provided within the new system. Section 3, describes the addition of an information retrieval mechanism to help co-authoring. Section 5, discusses future work, and finally, Section 6 presents the conclusions that can be drawn from the work so far.



next up previous
Next: Cooperative Microcosm Up: Cooperative Work in Microcosm Previous: Cooperative Work in Microcosm



Fri Dec 8 14:41:14 GMT 1995