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Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Information Systems and the Internet 3
2.1 The Internet 3
2.2 Basic Internet Services 6
2.3 Archie 7
2.4 WAIS 7
2.5 The Internet Gopher 8
2.6 The World Wide Web 9
2.7 Further Reading 11
3 Hypermedia Systems 13
3.1 What is Hypertext and Hypermedia? 13
3.2 The Origins of Hypermedia 14
3.3 Types of Hypermedia System 16
3.4 When to use Hypermedia 17
3.5 Navigating Hyperspace 18
3.6 Further Reading 21
4 Hyper-G - A Second Generation Web Server 23
4.1 The Evolution of Hyper-G 23
4.2 The Need for "Second Generation" Web Systems 24
4.3 The Design of Hyper-G 29
4.4 The Architecture of Hyper-G 31
4.5 The Hyper-G Server 33
4.6 Hyper-G Clients 34
4.7 Hyper-G Tools and Utilities 37
4.8 Serving to the Web with Hyper-G 38
4.9 Applications of Hyper-G 41
4.10 Further Reading 42
5 Browsing Cyberspace with Harmony 45
5.1 Designing a Graphical Hypermedia Client 45
5.2 The Architecture of Harmony 46
5.3 Browsing Collections, Clusters and Documents with Harmony 47
5.4 Harmony's Document Viewers and Hyperlink Navigation 52
5.5 The Harmony Local Map 63
5.6 Searching in Harmony 65
5.7 Harmony's History Browser 68
5.8 Harmony for WWW and Gopher Sites 69
5.9 Harmony System Functions 70
5.10 Harmony Options and Preferences 71
5.11 Multilingual Support 72
5.12 System Status and Communication with Other Users 73
5.13 Further Reading 76
6 Building Cyberspace with Harmony 77
6.1 Moving Beyond the Provider-Consumer Paradigm 77
6.2 Object and Document Creation 78
6.3 Document Editing 83
6.4 Modifying Attributes 86
6.5 Interactive Link Editing 88
6.6 Structure Editing 98
6.7 Deleting Objects 100
6.8 Annotations 100
6.9 Managing Users and User Groups 102
6.10 Further Reading 104
7 Beholding Cyberspace with VRweb 105
7.1 3D Hypermedia and the Internet 105
7.2 The Evolution of VRweb 106
7.3 The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 107
7.4 The VRweb VRML Browser 108
7.5 The VRweb User Interface 108
7.6 VRweb and Web Browsers 111
7.7 VRweb's Software Architecture 113
7.8 Beholding Cyberspace with VRweb 115
7.9 Further Reading 115
8 Visualising Cyberspace in Harmony 117
8.1 Visualising Information Spaces 117
8.2 Types of Information Visualisation 117
8.3 Examples of Information Visualisation 119
8.4 FSN and SGI's Information Landscape Patent 122
8.5 Visualising Cyberspace 122
8.6 Hyper-G's Rich Infrastructure for Visualisation 130
8.7 The Harmony Local Map 131
8.8 The Harmony Information Landscape 134
8.9 Further Reading 139
9 Outlook 141
9.1 General Trends 141
9.2 Work in Progress 141
9.3 Ideas for Future Work 143
10 Concluding Remarks 145
11 Bibliography 147