Hyper-G

CS4624 Hyper-G

Hyper-G is a hypermedia system developed in Graz, Austria. We run one of the main servers on video.cs.vt.edu, which is also a Foundation server for the Journal of Universal Computer Science, a Hyper-G supported electronic journal.

There are various clients:

Harmony, for X Windows;
Amadeus, for Windows; and
a VT100-terminal type command style interface.

Please see the screen dumps for those clients and online WWW information. More references and a narrative on Hyper-G provide further detail.

Hyper-G implements a distributed database among all its servers, that records all of the links. This means that one can have a link start or end even on read-only objects, and can find links pointing to a particular document. This also ensures consistency, e.g., that a link will not point to a deleted item.

Hyper-G indexes all text files as they are added, so searching is directly facilitated. It supports collection objects that thus allow hierarchies to be constructed, somewhat like Storyspace. There are special viewers included, which means that an anchor can be to any text string, circle on an image or video frame, etc.

Hyper-G allows text documents to be SGMl-coded using any DTD, including HTML. For any given type of document it requires both a DTD and a specification file that tells how to render each document element.