OHS Summaries

Overall Vision

http://www.bootstrap.org/vision_mission.htm

From the Bootstrap Institute web site

The goal of the OHS Project is to build an open source Open Hyperdocument System (OHS), the critical missing piece of the technology for enabling dynamic, distributed collective knowledge work. OHS is designed to be:

• Open. Provides vendor-independent access to hyperdocuments within and across work groups, platforms, and applications.
• Navigable. Provides flexible, bi-directional linking to any object in any multimedia file.
• Customizable. Allows users to select and create views of data best suited to task or preference.
• Dynamic. End-user functionality automatically changes over time to accommodate new multimedia object formats and methods for viewing them.
• Collaborative. Enables users to synchronously and asynchronously create, use, and modify hyperdocuments and dialog about them.
• Platform-neutral. User interaction components are written in Java.
• Interoperable. Provides a unifying framework within which (future) multi-vendor applications can interoperate.
• Reusable. Knowledge stored in it can be used and shared across time, and across knowledge and organizational domains.
• Extensible. New multimedia object types, means to interpret them, applications, views, and features can be added easily.
• Standards-based. Content formats are based on W3C XML standards.

Adam Cheyer's Summary

We are building an "Open Hyperdocument System", an open-source framework for the distributed management and interconnection of documents (using the "large" definition of documents as a representation of any computer-represented media), under the guidance and following the vision of Doug Engelbart, incorporating where possible "modern" Internet standards and technologies.

Eric Armstrong's Summary

Combine the simplicity and ease of use of an email system with the expressive power of Web documents. In essence, remove the barrier between email and documents, so you can comment on or even edit a document as easily as sending a message. While doing that, make it possible to categorize paragraphs (i.e. "messages") in order to carry on a well-organized discourse. Preliminary categories include "question", "alternative", "argument for", "argument against", and "endorsement". Categories like those have been found to be helpful in mediated discussion systems. We intend to put that thinking into software, so remote collaborators can carry on the same kind of highly reasoned discussions online.