Ph.D. progress report by

Preface My interest in mobile systems and hypermedia precedes my Ph.D. project by several years. I developed, together with my study group, my first hypermedia system in the autumn of 2000 as part of the Hypermedia course at Aarhus University. The system was a compiler engine written in Python which could compile guided tour maps created with the Webvise open hypermedia system (Sandvad et al., 2001), into interactive 3D VRML models. The system, Webvise3D, was later demonstrated at a demo session during the 12th Hypertext conference in 2001 (Poulsen et al., 2001). I received my master's degree in computer science in the spring of 2003. Together with Allan Hansen, I investigated W3C's proposed XLink standard as an open hy-permedia linking format and compared it to a number of other open hypermedia link models. Key to our work was also a prototype, the Xspect system, demonstrating that XLink indeed shared many of the qualities found in open hypermedia systems and the prototype also showed how XLink linkbases could be integrated with common Web browsers using standards such as XSLT and JavaScript. Thus, the results were presented to both the open hypermedia research community and the Web community. In February 2003 I was hired as a research assistant at the Centre for Interactive Spaces to work as programmer on the research project ContextIT, a project with two private partners, Euman A/S and TDC/InnovationLab, and the computer science departments at the universities in Aalborg and Aarhus. In the project I worked on the initial version of a hypermedia framework named HyCon. The HyCon framework was designed to encompass annotations, links, and guided tours associating locations and RFID-or Bluetooth-tagged objects with maps, Web pages, and collections of resources. The HyCon architecture extends upon earlier location based hypermedia systems by supporting authoring in the field and by providing access to browsing and searching information through a novel geo-based search (GBS) interface for the Web. The HyCon framework and the first prototype of HyConExplorer was documented in the article: " HyCon: A framework for context-aware mobile hy-permedia" in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia journal in late 2003 (Bouvin et al., 2003). The ContextIT project ended in December 2003 and the paper: " Integrating the Web and the World: Contextual trails on the move", summarised the joint results of the developed systems at the 15th Hypertext conference in 2004 (Hansen et al., 2004a). Since January …