A Vision for Open Hypermedia Systems

Currently, the Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) Working Group claims three main areas of interest: scenarios, reference architectures, and protocols. The discussions over scenarios of OHS use is supposed to inform the work on OHS reference architectures, which in turn is supposed to enable the development of an Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP) that will allow clients of one OHP-compliant OHS to use services of other OHP-compliant OHS’s. In this paper, we start from existing proposals for an OHS reference architecture and an OHP. We then present a number of scenarios that motivate modifications to these existing proposals. These modifications primarily include adding the notion of an open structure processing layer to the reference architecture and adding a fixed minimal set of guaranteed services to the protocol. We then present our resultant reference architecture and protocol proposals. Our proposals are based on current working group proposals, but incorporate the modifications suggested by our scenarios. Finally, we conclude with some comments on the process we used to derive our proposals, an evaluation of current progress of the OHS Working Group, and suggestions for future directions.