Acknowledgments

In presenting the background and details of Hyper-G, this book describes the outcome of the efforts of a team of researchers and developers mainly at the Graz University of Technology. Hyper-G would not have been possible without the support of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science, Research and Arts, the government of the province of Styria through JOANNEUM RESEARCH and a number of research grants too numerous to list here.

Above all, Hyper-G would not have been possibe without the support of colleagues and organizations from all over the world. It is not possible to mention all, but it is fair to make an attempt to mention at least a few: Bruno Buchberger from Linz, for his support and for accepting the directorshiip of the Hyper-G Consortium; Dieter Fellner from Bonn for his work on computer graphics and digital libraries; Thomas Ottmann from Freiburg for his belief in Hyper-G's suitability for teleteaching; Martin Grötschel and his team from Berlin including Joachim Lügger, Wolfgang Dalitz and Gernot Heyer for their critical evaluation of Hyper-G, for writing the first book about Hyper-G (Dalitz and Heyer, 1995) and proposing it as the distributed information system for all activities of the German Mathematical Society; Richard Christ from the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research and Hubert Partl from Austria's agricultaural university for endless hours of testing and valuable suggestions; Gerhard Triebnig from the European Space Agency for making it possible to adapt Hyper-G for ESA applications; Zavisa Bjelogrlic from Intecs in Italy as one of the first to use Hyper-G commercially; Hans Steiner from Siemens Austria as an early propoent of Hyper-G as both the basis of projects and a company-internal information system; Robert-Cailliau from CERN, one of the fathers of WWW, for encouraging us to move beyond WWW; Mark McCahill, chief designer of Gopher, for his help and cooperation; Joseph Hardin from the NCSA for his cooperation on VRML and other aspects of Hyper-G; Cris Calude from Auckland and Arto Salomaa from Turku for suggesting Hyper-G as the basis for J.UCS, the Journal of Universal Computer Science; and Arnoud de Kemp from Springer who helped to make J.UCS a reality; the over 170 J.UCS editors who have contributed to establish Hyper-G as a basis for electronic publishing to the extent that a range of publishing companies including Springer, Academic Press, Addison-Wesley, Wiley, Meyer, Bibliographisches Institut, Langenscheidt and Oxford Press are now using Hyper-G or Hyper-G spin-offs; the HyperMedia Unit of the University of Auckland for supporting Hyper-G from the beginning; MONZ, the Museum of New Zealand, with Channa Jayasinha as the first testbed of Hyper-G in the context of museums; Ed Fox from Virginia Tech, David Skillicorn from Queens University in Otario, Dan Sutherland from Pittsburgh and Steve Poltrock from Boeing in Seattle as the first Hyper-G users and constructive critics in the USA and Canada; Ivan Tomek from Acadia University in Canada for important advice in the design phase; Peter Wegner from Brown University for continuing encouragement; Pat Hall from the Open University in the UK for a careful evaluation of Hyper-G for European projects; Gunter Schlageter from the Distance Education University of Hagen in Germany for getting Lafthansa interested in Hyper-G; Gerhard Barth from Daimler Benz for considering Hyper-G as a tool for storing corporate knowhow; Udo Flohr for his very careful and positive evaluation of Hyper-G; Jakob Nielsen and Billy Barron for their early interest in Hyper-G as noticeable in their recent publications on hypertext/hypermedia (Nielsen, 1995) and the Internet (Barron et al., 1995); Georg Stork from the European Comission for his interest in Hyper-G for digital library projects; Austrian organizations such as WIFI, Bundeswirtschaftskammer, the University of Klagenfurt and others who started with Hyper-G early on, and, above all, the large number of current Hyper-G users who have stuck with us through a long series of early problems, improvements and bug fixes. To all of them, and to many who have not been mentioned, a cordial thank-you: thank you for helping us in moving from first-generation success stories such as Gopher and WWW to the next generation of hypermedia systems in which we believe Hyper-G will have a significant role to play.

Finally, as editor of this book my special thanks go to the other authors as listed in the various chapter headings; to all other members of the Hyper-G team at Graz who have substantially contributed to Hyper-G yet do not appear as authors, such as Jörg Faschingbauer, Mansuet Gaisbauer, Bernhard Heidegger and Berhard Marschall. My thanks also go to all our students who have worked with, tested, criticized and improved Hyper-G, to Robin Balean from Australia who helped polish our English and Achim Schneider from Germany who was instrumental in the final phase to get this manuscript out in a proper format; and finally to Addison-Wesley for helping us make this book a reality.

Hermann Maurer
Graz, Austria, January 1996