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Recommended Reading    (01)

Background/Historical Information    (02)

Anyone interested in understanding and contributing to our work must first understand the motivations and conceptual basis for what we're trying to do. Doug layed out his goals and his plans in his landmark 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework".    (03)

One thing that both Doug and Ted Nelson have in common is that they were both inspired by Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think".    (04)

For updated information on Doug's conceptual framework, you should read the transcripts from Doug's Colloquium at Stanford in early 2000, where he explained his ideas in great detail. These transcripts record 30 hours of lectures, so browse at your leisure.    (05)

For more historical information about Doug's work, read his paper, "Workstation History and the Augmented Knowledge Workshop" <AUGMENT,101931,>, published in December 4, 1985. Also see Stanford's MouseSite, which includes streaming video of Doug's groundbreaking demonstration of the NLS hypertext system in 1968. A more complete list of Doug's publications is available at the Bootstrap Institute's web site.    (06)

Open Hyperdocument System    (07)

Doug layed out his most recent plans for the OHS Hyperscope on October 23, 2000 in "Draft OHS Project Plan" <BI,2120,>. Perhaps the best technical summary of the OHS (although slightly outdated in some respects) is presented in "Technology Template Project: OHS Framework" <ALLIANCE,980,>, published on January 28, 1998.    (08)

Two papers that describe how the OHS fits into Doug's framework for knowledge work are "Knowledge-Domain Interoperability and an Open Hyperdocument System" <AUGMENT,132082,> (June 1990) and "Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware" <AUGMENT,132811,> (June 1992).    (09)

Our first OHS target community is software developers. On April 29, 1994, John Rothermel published a detailed report on how the OHS would affect software development: "Open Hyperdocument System Technology Exploration: IR&D Final Report" <AUGMENT,133265,>. Later, John sent an e-mail to Doug describing some categories for comparing the OHS with other knowledge management systems: "OHS Comparison Categories" <AUGMENT,133249,> (May 30, 1994).    (010)

Augment    (011)

Two very good papers that describe some of Augment's features and functionality are "Authorship Provisions in Augment" <OAD,2250,> (December 9, 1983) and "Collaboration Support Provisions in Augment" <OAD,2221,> (October 25, 1983). John Rothermel described what differentiated Augment from other systems in an e-mail entitled "Augment Differentiators" <AUGMENT,133247,> (May 21, 1994).    (012)

Nicholas Carroll has put together some documentation for the Augment Smalltalk client.    (013)

Xanadu    (014)

There are some very strong parallels between our work and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. The best source of information on Xanadu is Nelson's book, Literary Machines. The article, "Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More Than Ever" (May 23, 2000), summarizes many of the points found in Nelson's book. More general information about Xanadu is available in its FAQ.    (015)

Project Xanadu recently released some of its previous work as open source, under the name Udanax (Xanadu backwards). A lot of very good technical documentation is available in the Udanax Green manual.    (016)

Nelson's latest project is ZigZag. The best ZigZag site is GZigZag, which is a GPL'd version of ZigZag.    (017)

Other    (018)

The W3C is doing a lot of important, related work. Dan Connolly analyzed the World Wide Web in terms of Doug's requirements for the OHS in "An Evaluation of the World Wide Web with Respect to Engelbart's Requirements", updated on January 12, 2001. Most recently, many of the key members of the W3C have been focusing their efforts on the Semantic Web, which was described by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila in their May, 2001 article in Scientific American.    (019)

Two excellent articles on designing collaboration systems are Jon Udell's "Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration" (2000) and "Beyond Threaded Discourse", a paper presented by Jim Hewitt at WebNet 1997.    (020)

William Kent wrote an outstanding book on information representation entitled Data and Reality. I highly recommend it. Roger Hill wrote an essay, "Information Is What Confuses Us" that summarizes some of Kent's ideas.    (021)

Many of us find the IBIS methodology intriguing. E. Jeffrey Conklin, directory of CogNexus Institute, has written two other excellent papers on knowledge management: "Designing Organizational Memory" and "Wicked Problems: Naming the Pain in Organizations", coauthored by William Weil. Another good paper related to collaboration systems is Frank M. Shipman III and Catherine C. Marshall's "Formality Considered Harmful: Experiences, Emerging Themes, and Directions".    (022)

Peter Skagestad's Thinking With Machines: Intelligence Augmentation, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Semiotic" (1993) discusses some philosophical issues underlying Doug's work. Daniel Chandler's book, Semiotics for Beginners provides a good introduction to semiotics, and is available free on the Web.    (023)

Related theoretical works on knowledge representation include John Sowa's Knowledge Representation and Francis Heylighen's "Bootstrapping knowledge representations: from entailment meshes via semantic nets to learning webs".    (024)

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