Microcosm

This is a practical hypertext product developped by a team at Southampton university. It was well presented in the penultimate paper session at ECHT90, along with an application in which the memoirs and document collection of Lord Louis Mountbatten were saved in digital hypermedia form.

The software runs currently on MSDOS/Windows3. It comprises a number of viewers for different types of information, such as text, graphics, still video and moving video. As far as we could tell, the viewers will not nest - that is, text cannot contain graphics or video.

Generic Linking

A feature of Microcosm is that links are made using keywords in the following way. Within a certain region (for example, a set of documents), a keyword is connected to a particular destination. This means that a large number of links may be declared rapidly, and markup in the document itself is not needed. This is particularly useful when converting existing data into hypertext. The links are similar to glossary items. A disadvantage seemed to me to be that it is not obvious which words take one to particularly important new material, but I imagine that one could indicate that in the text.

Generic linking seemed to bridge the gap between full text indexing and hypertext links . In the WWW context, one could imagine a document having an associated search list of related indexes, generic links being early on the search list, a full text document index being near the middle, and the dictionary being at the end.