Proceedings of the 5 th Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems ACM Hypertext ’ 99 Conference Darmstadt , Germany , February 21 - 25 , 1999

Users often face difficulties in accessing documents referenced by open hypermedia systems due to the different protocolsemployed. This is particularly a problem for OHP as it will often need to access documents in many varied hyperbasesystems’ stores or other third party information repositories when navigating links. This position paper proposes a documentmanagement protocol, called the ContentSpec Protocol (CSP), for use in combination with the OHP, and with openhypermedia systems in general. This protocol would enable standardised access to documents in third party data stores,creating a wider information space for open hypermedia users to explore.