General Information
If you have special questions that are not covered by the information you can get from our support daemon, please feel free to send email to the address mentioned above. If the subject of your mail does not match one of the special subjects above the mail will automatically be forwarded to the J.UCS technical and editorial staff and will be answered as soon as possible.
Please note that as alternative to using our support daemon you can also get the information files via anonymous ftp at iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, subdirectory /pub/JUCS.
Klaus Schmaranz
(Graz University of Technology, Austria
kschmar@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at)
Abstract: J.UCS - the Journal for Universal Computer Science is an electronic hypermedia journal. This paper is a guide for authors who want to submit articles to J.UCS. Since J.UCS has to be able to deal with articles of many different wordprocessing systems we accept PostScript as primary format, but further interfaces for RTF, LaTeX and DVI are provided. A special style sheet for J.UCS authors was designed to ensure a uniform layout of articles published in J.UCS and to make the task of automatic creation of hyperlinks easier. NOTE: The first test issue of J.UCS (vol. 0, no. 0) will appear November 94. Regular service - for which submissions are solicited as of now - will start January 95.
Key Words: J.UCS, Hyper-G, style sheet, file formats, electronic
journals, electronic publishing
Category: A.0
To peruse J.UCS you do not log into one particular server but you can choose a server geographically convenient for you. Indeed, organisations are encouraged to install their own J.UCS server (the necessary software is also available free of charge). For more information on J.UCS in general send an (empty) email to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, Subject: [info]. For more information on how to use J.UCS send an (empty) email to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, Subject: [howto]. To obtain the latest version of the style sheet send an (empty) email to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, Subject: [format]. To subscribe to regular informations on J.UCS send an (empty) email to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, Subject: [subscribe]. To unsubscribe from these informations send an (empty) email to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, Subject: [unsubscribe]. Send submissions to J.UCS as email (if necessary uuencoded) to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, Subject: [submissions]. As an alternative submissions can be uploaded using anonymous ftp to iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, subdirectory /pub/JUCS-incoming. For a list of acceptable file formats see [Chapter 3].
A very wide variety of wordprocessing systems can be used for writing articles since our preferred file format is PostScript and nearly every wordprocessor has at least a PostScript printer driver. Other formats accepted are RTF, LaTeX and DVI. However, since J.UCS contributions cannot only be viewed and printed on a variety of platforms, but J.UCS is also available from Springer both in printed form and on CD-ROM it is essential that certain conventions are strictly followed as set out in the style sheet below. Note that contributions in J.UCS can be annotated. The process of annotation and of adding additional hypermedia links will be described in a contribution in Volume 0 of J.UCS [see Maurer and Schmaranz (1994)] that will be available end of November 94. This volume will also contain much further information on the philosophy, on J.UCS editors and servers and on technical details and future extensions of J.UCS
Please note that this article itself is written following our style guidelines, with exception of the font rules, since the distribution is done as plain ASCII text.
Next come the authors, capitalized and centered between the margins, in the form First Name Second Name. Multiple authors should be delimited by a single blank line. Use a serif typeface (e.g. Times), 10 point. Every author is followed by his/her location and email address, centered between the margins. Use a serif typeface (e.g. Times), 9 point.
Leave at least three blank lines after the last author. Please do not put any acknowledgements or thanks here, but place them in the optional Acknowledgement section at the end of the document.
Example: The Knowledge of Special Formats Aladin Claus Wonko (University of Auckland, New Zealand awonko@cs.aukuni.ac.nz) Fojin Tsio (Graz University of Technology, Austria ftsio@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at)
Font sizes, numbering and styles for the different types of headings: Title: unnumbered, centered, 14 point, bold Example: Computer Theory (centered) 1st-level heading: single numbered, left-justified, 12 point, bold Example: 1 Introduction 2nd-level heading: double numbered, left-justified, 10 point, bold Example: 2.2 Flow Charts 3rd-level heading: triple numbered, left-justified, 10 point, bold Example: 2.2.1 Nodes 4th-level heading: quadruple numbered, left-justified, 10 point, italic Example: 2.2.1.2 Input Nodes
Example: ...this special form [see Wonko and Tsio 1999b] is very... ...as described in [Wonko (99a)]... ...and this algorithm [Tsio et al. 1999c] is used...
Insert the sequence "[
Insert the sequence "[
When placing a markup to a chapter of the actual document use either
the form [
Example: ...we will discuss this later in [Chapter 4].
...see [Section 4] for further details on...
...see [Chapter 4 Publishing] for further details on...
...chapter [4 Publishing] provides more information...
For a markup to a footnote use the form [
Please use exactly the format given here to allow us to insert
Hypertext links automatically by searching for these special
sequences. (Note: everything enclosed in '<' and '>' is optional.)
- referencing Books:
[Goll (99)] Goll, J.: "The Guide to Hyper-G"; Springer,
- referencing Journals:
[Wonko and Tsio 99b] Wonko, A. C., Tsio, F.: "Extended Use of
Hyperlinks"; J.UCS (Journal for Universal Computer Science),
5, 3 (1999), 225-327.
- referencing Proceedings:
[Tsio 99a] Tsio, F.: "Hypermedia Systems in the Future"; Proc.
Ed-MEDIA'99, AACE Publishing, Vancouver (1999), 115-123.
- referencing Reports:
[Mollester, Goll 99c] Mollester, K., Goll, J.: "Information Landscapes
and their Advantages in Large Hypermedia Systems"; IIG Report
998, Graz, Austria (1999), also appeared as electronic version,
anonymous FTP autnet.org, in publications/June-99-online.
Example:
_________________________________
[1] as we mentioned earlier this is how to write footnotes
You should not have problems generating a file in one of those
formats, no matter which wordprocessor you are using. When submitting
a file, please follow the rules given below, allowing us to be able to
read and convert your article.
MS-Windows Users: We tested all PS Printer Drivers available to us,
and they all worked. But be careful when configuring your printer
driver
- There MUST be a PS Header sent with the printing job.
- You MUST use the substitution table for fonts and and you MUST
enter "download font" for every font used in the document.
DVIPS users: No problems were detected, the only thing is that you
MUST NOT use the M option.
If you want to make sure that the document you submit is in the
correct format, you may try, whether ghostscript (or ghostview) can
correctly deal with it, since ghostscript is the kernel of our
conversion software. Ghostscript is a PostScript Interpreter available
on many ftp servers worldwide for various platforms including most of
the UNIX derivates, MS-Windows, OS/2 and Windows-NT.
You may also submit a testfile (e.g. the first page of the paper) as
email to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at with the Subject [testfile]. We will
test its compatibility to our conversion software and send you an
email about the test result.
3.3 LaTeX
If you use a special LaTeX style file, please submit it together with
your article. We recommend to use our prepared style sheet for J.UCS
you can obtain by sending email to JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at, Subject:
[latex]. This style file will be ready by 08-1994.
3.4 DVI
Please use common fonts found on most computers. Please do not use
decorative typefaces.
4 References
[Maurer and Schmaranz 1994] Maurer, H., Schmaranz, K.: "J.UCS - The
Next Generation in Electronic Journal Publishing"; J.UCS
(Journal for Universal Computer Science) 0, 0 (1994), 2-20.
[ACM 1994] "The Full Computing Reviews Classification System";
Computing Reviews 35, 1 (1994), 6-16.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the kind permission of ACM to use their classification
system and the fact that ACM is actively encouraging J.UCS by operating a
foundation server.
2.4.2 Literature References:
Every Reference must start with the sequence "[Name <(>year
Heidelberg / New York (1999)
The form 5, 3 (1999) indicates volume number 5, issue number 3 1999.
225-327 indicate the page numbering.
2.4.3 Figures:
Center the figures between the margins with one blank line above.
Insert the text "Figure n: description" (without the quotes) after
each Figure (n is a unique number that identifies the figure;
description is a short description about the contents of Figure
n. Please use an expressive description for your figures to allow
finding them in a keyword search). Use a 10 point italic font for
this text.
2.4.4 Tables:
Center the tables between the margins with one blank line above.
Insert the text "Table n: description" (without the quotes) after the
table (n is a unique number that identifies the table; description is
a short description about the contents of Table n. Please use an
expressive description for your figures to allow finding them in a
keyword search). Use a 10 point italic font for this text.
2.4.5 Footnotes:
Seperate footnotes from the preceding main text by a line from the
left to the center of the page. Start the footnote with the sequence
"[n]", where n is the unique number of that footnote (unique means,
that this number can only appear once on a page, not throughout the
whole document). Use a 9 point font for footnote text.
3 Accepted File Formats
To provide an interface to a wide variety of wordprocessors we decided
to accept PostScript as our main file format. However you can also
submit articles as RTF, LaTeX or DVI files. Submitted files can be
compressed using the following methods: compress, gzip, zip, arj, arc,
pak, zoo, lzh.
3.1 PostScript
You MUST include every font information in the PostScript output file
to make sure that all the fonts are available for us when converting
the document. Depending on the program you use for generating the
PostScript file there is either a commandline switch for this purpose,
or in the case you generate the file with a printer device driver
there should be an option not to use built in printer fonts, but
download all Fonts instead.
3.2 RTF
Please use common fonts found on most computers. Please do not use
decorative typefaces.
Journal for Universal Computer Science
Cris Calude
(University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Hermann Maurer
(Graz University of Technology, Austria
hmaurer@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at)
Arto Salomaa
(University of Turku, Finland)
1 Introduction
Almost all researchers in computer science have access to Internet by
now: with some 2 million Internet nodes at the time of writing an
estimated 20-100 million people can connect to Internet, many of them
directly from their desk.
Internet has become an increasingly powerful information,
communication and cooperation system. It is clear that the time has
arrived to use Internet for the distribution of a prestigious journal
in computer science that is universal in three ways: it can be used
world-wide and at any time of the day or night, and it covers all
aspects of computer science.
Observe that the first two aspects can be guaranteed by a judicious
use of network facilities as described later; the third aspect - the
coverage of a wide spectrum of areas - would make a printed journal
too bulky and too cumbersome to use. Proper use of computers
eliminates this problem.
This project describes the creation of such a journal, the problems
involved and the solution adopted, and how this journal, the Journal
for Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) will operate.
J.UCS will appear in 12 yearly issues, starting in January 95.
Submissions will be accepted starting Sept. 1, 94.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. After introducing the
basic premises in [Section 2], a review of problems and solutions is
presented in [Section 3]. In [Section 4] the process of submitting,
refereeing and publishing a paper is described in detail. [Section 5]
mentions some further general points and future extensions, and
[Section 6] contains a few references.
2 Basic Premises
J.UCS, the Journal for Universal Computer Science will be distributed
mainly in electronic form. However, a CD-ROM version will be made
available at the end of each year for archival purposes. Indeed, the
CD-ROM version will include a print utility that will allow the
printing of individual papers, or all papers, or all papers in a
coherent subject area, so that organisations can - if they wish - make
printed versions of the journal or parts of the journal available to
their clientele.Also,an official version will be availble in printed
form around the same time the CD ROM is distributed.
J.UCS is supported by Springer Publishing Company: Springer has agreed
to mention J.UCS in some of its publications and mailings; Springer
will be the distributor of the CD-ROM version mentioned and will also
publish and distribute an official printed version. Thus, every
contribution accepted will not only appear in electronic form, but
also as part of a refereed, printed high quality journal.
If sucessful as expected, Springer will operate J.UCS on a commercial
bases from 1997 onward. The yearly subscription will be around US
$100.-- per year. One such subscription by any organisation will
allow free access to the journal for all members of that organisation
from their workstations or terminals, albeit only one user at a
time. Suitable licensing procedures that are convenient for all users
have been worked out. They will be desribed at a later stage.
J.UCS is a high quality publication. Each submission will be
scrutinized by a minimum of three referees and accepted only if it
measures up to the standards of prestigious printed journals in
computer science. J.UCS is published in volumes (one per year) with
monthly issues. The material is structured into pages that are
numbered consecutively. Thus, papers can be quoted exactly like in
usual journals, with name(s) of author(s), title, name of journal,
volume number, issue number, and page numbers. An editorial board
consisting of over 100 eminent computer scientists covering all areas
of computer science and coming from all corners of the world is in its
formative stage and will ensure that a paper appearing in J.UCS will
be as prestigious as a paper in any other reputable refereed
journal. The original editorial board constitutes the board of
"Foundation Editors" and will be extended in the following years as
seems necessary.
The process of submitting papers, of refereeing papers, all
communications between authors and editors, and the access to the
papers will mostly be carried out electronically via
Internet. However, papers can always be printed out for refereeing,
for reading, for archiving or even for distribution. The distribution
of individual contributions in the J.UCS for non-commercial use is
expressly permitted free of charge unless explicitly stated
otherwise. The distribution of whole issues of the J.UCS is handled
exclusively by designated central servers [see Section 3].
J.UCS is operated on a non-profit basis: editors and referees carry
out their work on an honorary basis, as is the case with most
professional journals. Nevertheless, J.UCS will only be available
free of charge during a trial period of two years, i.e. during 1995
and 1996. After this initial period, charges to recover the costs of
running the necessary central servers, potential network costs, and
sundry items, will be collected as will be explained in [Section 3].
Thus, J.UCS is not intended to be a free publication. However, despite
its high quality it will certainly be less expensive than comparable
printed journals, and much easier to peruse.
We believe that journals such as J.UCS will eventually replace printed
journals. However, the J.UCS attempt is not seen as competing with
current publishing companies but rather as a large scale experiment:
if successful - and we firmly believe it will be - J.UCS might suggest
how professional publishing houses should go about the distribution of
journals and even books in the future. Note that most current computer
journals do not pay fees or royalties to authors, and neither will
J.UCS . However, in the system used for transporting J.UCS the
charging mechanism could well be employed in the future to collect
royalties for contributions in other electronic journals or for books
published in a way similar to J.UCS.
Contributions in J.UCS can be located and read (on the screen or after
being printed out) much like in any other journal. However,
contributions can also be located by searching for keywords in the
title, in the list of keywords supplied by the author, in the text, by
author, by category, and by combinations thereof. All contributions
are put in one or more categories based on a classification scheme
used by ACM in their Computing Reviews (CRCS). Hence, e.g. searching
for all papers between 95 and 97 with classification E.1 or "Data
Structures" would produce a "subjournal" of all papers of J.UCS
published in the three years 95 to 97 classified as contributions to
"Data Structures". Note that contributions may well be classified
under more than one category. Typically, a paper on "Hypertext" might
be classified as H.5.1.3 ("Multimedia Information Systems) or/and
I.7.2 ("Document Preparation"). The classification scheme of ACM's
Computing Reviews is quite detailed and fairly up-to-date (the last
revision ocured less than two years ago). Please observe that the
complete classification is always printed in the January issue of each
year of the Computing Reviews: this also contains an "inverted list",
i.e. looking up any title does give you immediately the correct
classification. The CRCS update editor is Professor Neal S. Coulter
from the Florida Atlantic University who we has also joined J.UCS as
one of the Foundation Editors. Thus, if changes or extensions
concerning the categories are necessary J.UCS will have immediate
information.
"Subjournals" of J.UCS can also be created on the basis of other
search criteria such as author, keywords, etc.
The main advantages of J.UCS over traditional journals are:
- fast turn-around time between submission of paper and publication;
- no limit on the size of an issue: all papers ready at a particular
point in time appear in the next issue;
- easy access at all Internet access points with a range of search
functions;
- less expensive than other journals;
- worldwide circulation;
- hyperlinks and annotation.
The last point merits some explanation. Authors of contributions can
refer to other papers using the usual reference mechanism. However, if
the paper quoted has appeard in J.UCS at a prior stage, clicking at
the reference leads directly to the document at issue, and to a
specific location within the document if such location ("destination
anchor") has been specified. Conversely, contributions can be
"annotated" later by the original author or other persons. All
annotations go through an editorial process and are dealt with like
"letters to the editor"; the main difference is that, when reading a
document with annotations, the presence of annotations is pointed out:
hence readers may be alerted to new results, corrections of errors,
novel developments, etc. The process leading to such annotations is
described in more detail in section 4.
3 What is the Big Deal?
Bulletin boards, collections of pictures and software modules, and
electronic journals have been existing in Internet for a long time. So
what is new about J.UCS, why is it such a great idea?
Well, the idea is neither great nor new. Literally thousands of
researchers have had it before, and some have already acted, by
issuing regular journals, newsletters or even whole user-written
encyclopedias via Internet. However, all attempts to date that we are
aware of are restricted to a narrow area, and/or are limited to the
use of certain software/hardware platforms, and/or do not support
sophisticated searching techniques for locating papers and/or are
lacking a serious refereeing structure (and hence the prestige of
printed journals) and are somewhat hampered by the less than 100 %
reliability of long-range network connections. For one example see
[Steinberger 94].
J.UCS aims at covering computer science in general; its quality is
assured by a large editorial board with eminent computer scientists
and a thorough refereeing process; it is largely format and platform
independent and deals with the problem of network (un)reliability by
means of a distributed server approach. Both points are elaborated in
what follows in more detail.
J.UCS is based on a networked multimedia system called Hyper-G
(see.e.g. [Kappe, Maurer, Scherbakov 93] and [Kappe, Maurer 93])
developed by a team of specialists between 1989 and today.
Developments of further Hyper-G features and maintenance of the system
is guaranteed till at least 2000 due to contracts with a number of
large organisations using Hyper-G, including e.g. a growing number of
universities, museums, and the European Space Agency. Hyper-G is
based on a client/server architecture with the server running on
standard UNIX machines (e.g. from SUN,DEC,HP,SGI) and clients are
available for UNIX (both under X Windows and for simple terminals) and
Microsoft Windows. A client for an Apple Macintosh is under
development. All Hyper-G software is available free of charge (by
anonymous FTP; look on host iicm.tu-graz.ac.at in directory
pub/Hyper-G). While the software is currently in beta stage, a version
1.0 is to be released on June 30, 94. It is not necessary to install a
server for casual use of J.UCS.
The server stores collections of document clusters, where a document
can be a text file, a picture, an audio- or videoclip, or some other
data-type. For J.UCS, only text files in English and pictures are
permitted, initially. (See also [Section 5]). Information can be
accessed using menus, various search-techniques and via hypertext
links.
To use the material, a viewer for the type of terminal at issue is
necessary. Viewers are supported for Windows, Macintosh and X-Window
platforms (and an ASCII-text only viewer for VT100 displays). All
viewers can be downloaded by anonymous FTP. Hyper-G is compatible with
WWW [Berners-Lee 92] and Gopher [Alberti 92] to the extent that WWW
and Gopher viewers can be used for Hyper-G with some loss of
functionality. Since stable Hyper-G-specific viewers are available
right now for Windows and X-Windows (and more elegant versions by June
94), and a Mac Viewer is under development, the use of Hyper-G
specific viewers is recommended for J.UCS.
Textual information is stored in Hyper-G in HTF format (a format based
on SGML), and pictures are used where HTF is not general enough
(e.g. for complex formulae). Both inline images and external images
are supported in HTF.
The strength of Hyper-G is that a number of widely-used text formats
can be converted automatically to Hyper-G internal form and can then
be viewed on a variety of platforms such as PC (Windows), Mac or
Unix-workstations (X-Windows).
The central J.UCS server will reside at the IICM (Institute for
Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media) of the Graz
University of Technology. However, to be less dependent of Internet
connections to Austria a number of J.UCS servers scattered all over
the world will be set up. Servers set up by the end of 94 are called
the "Foundation Servers". Further servers are welcome and expected to
join later. To set up a J.UCS server is easy: a Unix machine with at
least a few hundred MByte free harddisk space and an Internet
connection is all that is necessary. The J.UCS server software
(Hyper-G) is available free of charge by anonymous FTP. Every J.UCS
server registers as such with the IICM and is thereby entitled to
download regularly the new issues of J.UCS. Downloading will be free
throughout 96. A nominal yearly fee to cover expenses will be charged
thereafter. J.UCS servers are encouraged to pass on their costs to
users, in turn.
Users can read the J.UCS by accessing any of the available J.UCS
servers. Clearly, major universitites and research organisations will
be well advised to run their own J.UCS server: this way, access to the
J.UCS is optimally fast, independent of network problems and the
server (based on Hyper-G, a powerful hypermedia system) may well be
used also for other purposes. Alternativley, a group of
well-networked organisations may choose to run one joint server for
reasons of economy, and still other institutions may decide to access
the nearest public J.UCS via Internet.
4 The Submission Process
Papers are submitted as email to (one of) the managing director(s) of
J.UCS; initially this job will be carried out by H.Maurer,
JUCS@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at. They can be submitted in a number of formats
(typically as PostScript, LaTeX or RTF files as produced by most
common word processing packages such as Winword or WordPerfect)
according to the "instructions for authors".
They are automatically converted to Hyper-G format and sent to at
least two editors who (or their designees) are refereeing the
contribution. Refereeing can be done using a Hyper-G viewer that
allows to insert comments at any spot.
Note that the referee may decide to have the contribution printed out
(in an initial phase may even request to have printed versions sent
from the managing editor), make notes in the print-out and have
someone else handle the (simple) editing with the Hyper-G
viewer. Observe further that a Hyper-G viewer is available on most
major platforms, hence referees (and readers!) of the J.UCS need not
change their usual "environment". Refereed papers (or just comments
and an evaluation form) are returned, including recommendations
concerning publishability, via Internet to the managing editor. The
managing editor notifies the author(s) accordingly. If the
contribution is accepted, the author carries out whatever changes are
necessary and sends the final version to the managing editor once
more. The final version is, once more, converted into Hyper-G
format. It is at this point only accessible to the author and the
referees (if they have asked to check the final version). After the
author has potentially added some "hypertext links" (links to specific
places in contributions published in J.UCS earlier) and after
author(s) and referees have given their OK the paper is "finished" and
appears in the next issue.
The "instructions for authors" include information on permissible file
formats, on the classification and keyword scheme, on how to insert
links, etc.
Having contributions in electronic form in J.UCS certainly allows for
"links" in a hypertext sense to other points in the database. Links to
documents already existing in previous J.UCS issues can be handled as
described earlier. "Forward" links (i.e. links from a document to
another one that appeared later) can only be incorporated as
"annotations" or by following links backwards. The latter situation is
easy to explain: suppose document y refers to the (earlier) published
document x. When reading x the user is informed that "there are
documents referring to x" and all of those (clearly including the y in
the example) can be located with a simple command. The situation with
"annotations" is similar, except that "annotations" are not
contributions in a research sense but just notes concerning previous
contributions. Such "notes" ("letters to the editor") go through a
refereeing process much like other contributions and are added only if
deemed appropriate. Thus, an annotation by an author pointing out that
the result in her/his earlier contribution x has now been improved is
likely to be incorporated, an annotation claiming that all of
contribution x is nonsense is going to be scrutinized carefully before
being added to J.UCS as annotation. When annotations have been added
to a document x their existence is pointed out to the reader of x
similar to the case of documents referring to x mentioned earlier.
Observe that the philosphy of links and annotations explained above
brings some of the benefits of hypertext to J.UCS, yet assures that no
contribution that ever enters J.UCS can be changed at a later
stage. We consider this essential to have the stability in J.UCS
necessary to be able to quote contributions without fear that they may
change (as is happening in many other electronic information systems)!
It is finally worth mentioning that J.UCS will have an ISB Number and
its contributions will be reviewed and abstracted like contributions
in other journals.
5 Future Points and Future Extensions
As J.UCS develops it is clear that additional demands will be placed
on it. People will wish for other file formats to be allowed as
input, will wish for further search options, still better viewers,
viewers for still more platforms, the possibility for private
annotations, for customization, other language options and much, much
more ... including interfaces with other applications.
Many of these wishes will be implemented, we expect, on the basis of
the Hyper-G interface specification and will then be added to the
J.UCS. On some, like the interface with an electronic library of
books, some groups are already actively working.
As has been mentioned, J.UCS will also be distributed on CD-ROM for
permanent archival purposes, and J.UCS contributions can be printed
out. For an electronic journal this is a severe limitation: J.UCS
authors - if we forget the printing feature - could well be allowed to
also incorporate animation, movies, sound, 3D scenes with direct
manipulation facilities, and much more.
The J.UCS will follow such developments closely. We expect that
eventually J.UCS contributions may well include material that cannot
be printed, and that "eventually" will come around earlier than most
of us would think.
6 References
[Kappe, Maurer, Scherbakov 93] Kappe, F., Maurer, H., Scherbakov, N.:
Hyper-G - A Universal Hypermedia System; J.EMH (Journal of
Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia) 2, 1 (1993), 39-66
[Kappe, Maurer 93] Kappe, F., Maurer, H.: "Hyper-G: A Large Universal
Hypermedia System and Some Spin-offs"; IIG Report 364,
Graz/Austria (1993); also appeared as electronic version,
anonymous FTP siggraph.org, in
publications/May-93-online/Kappe.Maurer
[Berners-Lee 92] Berners-Lee, T., Cailliau, R., Groff, J., Pollermann
B., "WorldWideWeb: The Information Universe", Electronic
Networking: Research, Applications and Policy 1, 2 (1992),
52-58.
[Alberti92] Alberti B., Anklesaria F., Lindner P., McCahill M., Torrey
D., "The Internet Gopher Protocol: A distributed Document
Search and Retrieval Protocol", Available by anonymous ftp from
boombox.micro.umn.edu in directory pub/gopher/gopher_protocol.
[Steinberger 94] Steinberger, M.: "The New York Journal of
Mathematics", Available on gopher nyjm.albany.edu or anonymous
FTP on ftp_nyjm.albany.edu in directory /pub/nyjm
Acknowledgments
The idea for this project as described originated in discussions with
my friends Cris Calude and Arto Salomaa over the last years. I have
also mentioned J.UCS to many other colleagues and have to state
explicitly that the idea as such is not novel at all, yet many of the
details (various formats, platforms, and editors) are reasonably scary
once you look at them more closely. However, having developed a
multimedia system capable of handling something like J.UCS in
principle a number of the persons you find on the editorial board have
encouraged me to go ahead and get started. I want to thank all of
them, and all who have joined the "Foundation Board" and the
"Foundation Network" for their encouragement and trust. As sure as I
am that J.UCS will work based on Hyper-G I am equally sure that there
will be glitches, and, according to Murphy, at the worst possible
moments. Please bear with me when they arise and be tolerant with some
(hopefully small) problems: this is a new and exciting frontier! The
editorial board is explicitly responsible only for the ideas behind
J.UCS. All problems with management and software are my sole
responsibility and nobody else's.
ACM has endorsed our use of the ACM Review Category System beginning
of June 94 and is going to run their own foundation server for J.UCS
as ACM.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Advancing The Ideas of World-Wide-Web : Hyper-G
Hermann Maurer
(Institute for Information Processing and
Computer Supported New Media,
Graz University of Technology, Graz/Austria
email: hmaurer@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at)
Extended Abstract
WWW (World Wide Web)[Berners-Lee 92] has become the most successful
networked multimedia system employing the hypertext paradigm over the
last few years: Documents consisting of textual information can have
embedded pictures, movies or audioclips and reside on a s e r v e r ,
accessible e.g. via internet using suitable v i e w e r s. The only
structuring mechanism for sets of documents is the facility to place
-- in hypertext fashion -- anchors in documents leading to (linking
them to) other documents. Although this mechanism can be used to
create menu-like hierarchical structures WWW databases are basically
"flat" (stratified) collections of documents linked together. Thus, a
WWW database can be seen as a graph whose nodes are the links between
them. WWW has become an easy to use tool, mainly for small and
medium-scale multimedia presentations that are accessible world-wide
due to the excellent M o s a i c - viewer that is available on all
major platforms: X-Windows, Mac and MS-Windows.
However, WWW has a number of limitations that become apparent once
tasks more complex than "a few hundred multimedia screen applications"
are considered. No full-text search is provided as part of the WWW
server, let alone the possibility to search across boundaries of WWW
servers; authorisation features are lacking, hence the installation of
a number of independent WWW servers within an organisation is not
uncommon, for the simple reason of preventing access of unauthorised
groups. This fragmentation prevents more global searches: thus, one of
the main aims - to tie information together - gets lost due to the
lack of authorisation features and the boundaries imposed by each WWW
server.
To overcome such weaknesses WWW offers an ingenious way out: it allows
to start arbitrary application programs, thus letting users link into
other databases, employ complex search algorithms or activate any
other program desirable on top of WWW servers. This great flexibility
is achieved, however, at a big cost: the uniformity of the interface
disappears, different WWW servers start to behave differently: the
whole "jungle" of scattered databases each with a different feel as we
all know it from Internet starts to reappear, now on the level of WWW.
Realizing this dilemma, a group of some 30 researchers and developers
at the Graz University of Technology has started to systematically
examine the ideas, structure and underlying features of large
distributed multimedia servers, leading, eventually, to a concept
embracing WWW yet more general than WWW: Hyper-G. Hyper-G has been
developed carefully to ensure cross-operability with WWW. Hyper-G
databases have gateways to WWW (and Gopher [Alberti 92]), and
conversely; the Hyper-G viewer A m a d e u s (for MS-Windows) and H a
r m o n y (for X-Windows) will allow the perusal of WWW databases; and
the Mosaic Viewers of WWW can be used to access Hyper-G servers. (For
more details on Hyper-G see [Andrews 94a], [Andrews 94b], [Hyper-G
94], [Kappe 93a], and [Kappe 93b]).
The main difference between WWW and Hyper-G servers is that Hyper-G
provides much functionality integrated into it (and hence uniform in
nature) that has to be implemented on top of WWW (and hence
potentially differs from site to site) and that Hyper-G servers work
on a truly distributed platform: a user can activate a number of
Hyper-G servers (that may or may not be arbitrarily geographically
dispersed) in such a fashion that the union of all the databases
involved appears as if it were one single database. Indeed, the
Hyper-G concept is a bit deeper and more general:
The basic item of a Hyper-G database is a document cluster rather than
a single document: this is a convenient tool to handle such diverse
features as multiple languages, multiple windows or multiple
representations. A typical example of the latter is the treatment of
LaTeX documents in WWW (Mosaic) and Hyper-G: in Hyper-G the basic idea
is to store LaTeX documents as a cluster of two documents: one of them
is a textual document with in-line pictures for all formulae (this is
the approach taken in WWW/Mosaic), the other document is the DVI File
corresponding to the LaTeX document containing links to e.g. pictures,
i.e. a file retaining all the precision and beauty of the original
LaTeX version. For casual browsing on a medium resolution screen the
first alternative is the only viable one, for serious viewing (or
printing on a laser printer) the second one (not available in
WWW/Mosaic without some contortions) is the only one that makes sense.
Document clusters in Hyper-G are put together in so-called
c o l l e c t i o n s, and a collection can be part of one (or
more) parent collections. Thus, Hyper-G structures its documents into
a kind of hierarchy (actually not a tree, but a DAG). This is useful
for many reasons: documents can be inserted without defining links
(not possible in WWW: a document without a link to it is not
(properly) accessible in WWW; it is accessible in Hyper-G, however,
due to the collection structure); collections (and document clusters)
can have attributes, allowing Boolean searches on those attributes;
and although Hyper-G provides the full anchor-link hypertext paradigm
it also allows (Boolean or WAIS-like) full text searches within the
scope of any number of user-selected collections. Since each Hyper-G
database is a collection, users can activate even geographically
remote Hyper-G databases (better still: arbitrary sub-collections
within them) and perform powerful searches across all of them.
Note that such a facility is rather hard to implement in WWW: although
full text search can be added on top of WWW databases, scope
definitions are very difficult and automatic searches across various
WWW databases are next to impossible. Thus, Hyper-G avoids the danger
of independent "WWW-empires", the "Balkanisation" of databases as Ted
Nelson has so aptly called it!
However, it must be clearly recognized that Hyper-G generalises, but
makes full use of WWW and Mosaic facilities.
It is worthwhile to look at a specific example. Suppose a university
has five different WWW servers operated by five different departments,
each department authorized to modify only its own database, and
departments unable or unwilling to combine the data for exactly the
mentioned authorization problems. Although a good solution, it is not
perfect: to find information on person xxx within that university,
each of the five databases has to be queried. Maybe not even all of
them support full text searching or may support it using different
mechanisms: thus, the problem "where do I have to look and how do I do
it" (well-known from the world of Internet and international
databases) can arise using WWW even within a single institution (and
even more so if the databases are spread over various
institutions). Using Hyper-G, each of the five mentioned WWW databases
can be converted into five Hyper-G collections, all of them belonging
to the collection "University yyy". Authorisation to modify data
remains where it is desirable, yet a single full-text search for
"Person xxx" in the collection "University yyy" will reveal all
information on person xxx, if any such information is
available. Observe that no manual changes in any of the WWW databases
are necessary; nor is it necessary to abandon the viewer Mosaic, if
users have started to like this beautiful piece of software. On the
other hand, the Harmony viewer (see below) does provide all of
Mosaic's features and a few additional ones (and is available free of
charge like Mosaic), so may become a welcome addition at some stage
...
To take a larger and maybe more pertinent example: suppose a number of
universities in Germany use Hyper-G, each with a collection
"Mathematics". By defining a collection "Mathematics in Germany" a
single search will examine all sub-collections "Mathematics"
automatically, independent of where they are located geographically.
We believe that above notion of unions of collections defining scopes
for searches (or other actions!) is essential to prevent that a new
kind of fragmentation occurring on a new level.
Hyper-G was developed using also knowledge of and experience with WWW;
Hyper-G is thus influenced by WWW and has systematically tried to stay
consistent with WWW without giving up the insights gained in the
meantime:
- Big hypermedia systems must have a structure: a "flat" graph with no
"semantic" meaning of links will not do for large systems.
- Activities in large networked multi-media systems have to be
restricted to scopes definable by the users.
- Activities that are considered central (like searching, structuring,
non-private annotations, etc). have to be integrated into the basic
system so as to avoid unsystematic proliferation of "unorthogonal"
features.
Hyper-G is based on above premises.More on those and other points
(like mechnaisms for gathering statistics,billing and "active"
mail)will be contained in a full version of this paper. However, a few
more specific aspects should be mentioned:
The annotation concept in WWW (actually part of the Mosaic client)
allows "private" annotations that are stored locally. Hyper-G allows
to define authorisation classes for annotations, permitting "private",
"group" or "public" annotations.
Links in WWW are restricted to textual anchors, while Hyper-G supports
anchors in arbitrary data-types like pictures or movies. Links in
Hyper-G are bi-directional. Hyper-G introduces a sophisticated
authorisation mechanism defining for each user the rights to read,
create links, modify and annotate. This provides the basis for
sophisticated customisation and even CSCW within Hyper-G that have to
be -- like all other more sophisticated features -- built on top of
WWW (potentially creating confusion and incompatibility).
Hyper-G is being used as information system at a number of
universities (Graz University of Technology and the University of
Auckland are two examples); it has been selected as information system
by major organisations such as ESA (European Space Agency), it is the
basis of a multi-media guidance system by large museums or exhibition
operators (such as the new Museum of New Zealand, or the Images of
Austria Presentation at the EXPO' 92 at Sevilla); it is the platform
of one of the most ambitious (30 GByte data) multimedia projects
anywhere (the millenium celebration of Austria) and is the basis of
the first serious attempt of electronically publishing a high-quality
journal in computer scince, J.UCS (Journal of Universal Computer
Science): J.UCS is suported by Springer Pub.Co., has an editorial
board of some 150 prominent computer scientists and some 50
universites world-wide have agreed to act as server.
Hyper-G, as a late-comer in the field, has been able to profit from
and incorporate experience from earlier projects such as Gopher and
WWW. And despite the fact that Hyper-G will not be officially released
before June 30, 94 above list does show a fairly wide acceptance even
of its pre-beta-release version.
Since Mosaic has been the main driving force for WWW it is worthwhile
to mention that the current X-Windows viewer of Hyper-G will be
replaced by Harmony. (The current Harmony version is available as
development prototype for functionality tests if specifically
requested for such tests; it must not be considered an operational
tool before June 30, 94 [Hyper-G 94]).
Harmony includes all features of Mosaic, plus a graphical browser
giving document-type, history, in-and-out links, dynamic and static
environments, and incorporates a viewer of 3D objects and scenes
(including navigation within them) plus a first attempt at producing
3D "information landscapes".
The MS-Windows Viewer A m a d e u s is available as of July 94. It
implements a subset of Harmony's features on a MS-Windows platform.
Summarizing, WWW has been successful in establishing networked
multimedia as a major option for information systems of the future.
Hyper-G has been built using experiences with WWW and other
large-scale networked multimedia systems, preserving full
interoperability with WWW, yet incorporating all those features into
the basic system that have been universally accepted as
indispensable. In this sense, Hyper-G tries to contribute to a more
uniform and controlled environment of the world opened by WWW.
References
[Alberti 92] Alberti, B., Anklesaria, F., Lindner, P., McCahill M.,
Torrey D., "The Internet Gopher Protocol: A distributed
Document Search and Retrieval Protocol", Available by anonymous
ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu in directory:
pub/gopher/gopher_protocol.
[Andrews 94a] Andrews, K., Kappe, F.: Soaring Through Hyperspace: A
Snapshot of Hyper-G and its Harmony Client;
Proc. Eurographics-Multimedia 94, Graz, June 94; FTP
iicm.tu-graz.ac.at in: pub/Hyper-G/papers.
[Andrews 94b] Andrews, K., Kappe, F.: "Hyper-G: A New Tool for
Distributed Hypermedia"; submitted to ISMM Int. Conf. on
Distributed Multimedia Systems and Applications, Hawaii (1994);
anonymous FTP iicm.tu-graz.ac.at in: pub/Hyper-G/papers
[Berners-Lee 92] Berners-Lee T., Cailliau R., Groff J., Pollermann B.,
"WorldWideWeb: The Information Universe", Electronic Networking:
Research, Applications and Policy 1, 2 (1992), 52-58.
[Hyper-G 94] Reports, Information and SW concerning Hyper-G; anonymous
FTP iicm.tu-graz.ac.at in: pub/Hyper-G.
[Kappe 93a] Kappe, F., Maurer, H., Scherbakov, N.: "Hyper-G -- A
Universal Hypermedia System"; J.EMH (Journal of Educational
Multimedia and Hypermedia) 2, 1 (1993), 39-66
[Kappe 93b] Kappe, F., Maurer, H.: "Hyper-G: A Large Universal
Hypermedia System and Some Spin-offs"; anonymous FTP
siggraph.org, in: publications/May-93-online/Kappe.Maurer