Putting the Media into Hypermedia

This paper discusses the issues involved in putting the media into a hypermedia system. The main argument of the paper is that to-date media representation and underlying link strategies have been too closely tied together in the move from hypertext to hypermedia. We argue that it is necessary to separate the issues of media from link structure, and we present a model which solves some of the problems of genuine media integration in a hypermedia system. At the same time the model provides support for the creation of links between data of different media types in a conceptually meaningful way. The paper describes the design of Microcosm++, an object oriented extensible service-based architecture for building consistent integrated hypermedia systems. It is based on the Microcosm hypermedia system which was developed at Southampton. The current implementation of Microcosm++ demonstrates the flexibility of object-based services for making hypermedia more viable in a working environment. The approach described reduces authoring effort significantly while at the same time increasing the integrity of the link structures and providing a unified model for media integration.