Open Hyperdocument System

What is the OHS?    (01)

The Open Hyperdocument System (OHS) is a standards-based, open source framework for developing collaborative, knowledge management applications. Its primary objective is to support the creation, organization, and maintenance of Dynamic Knowledge Repositories (DKR).    (02)

The OHS's initial requirements are a result of 50 years of innovation and experimentation by Doug Engelbart and his team of researchers among a variety of user communities, including aerospace and software development. These requirements include fine-grained addressability of all types of documents and support for multiple views. Some of these features have found their way into existing tools, such as the World Wide Web, while others are currently being explored. The purpose of the OHS is to serve as a standard framework for these features, so that different applications may interoperate with the DKR and with each other.    (03)

As an intermediate step towards building the OHS, Engelbart has proposed the design for a Hyperscope, a tool for browsing heterogeneous document types and the linkages between them, which would be built on top of the OHS's hyperdocument architecture.    (04)

OHS Working Group    (05)

Bootstrap Alliance's OHS Working Group is responsible for the OHS's design and specification. In order to facilitate the coevolution of the OHS with its user communities, the OHS Working Group has developed a preliminary, community-oriented process for developing the OHS. This process borrows heavily from the methodologies of successful open source projects, such as the Apache project, and standards bodies, such as the W3C and OASIS. We expect this process to evolve in conjunction with the OHS.    (06)

History of the OHS    (07)

The OHS has its roots in Engelbart's revolutionary NLS/Augment system, the first working collaborative hypermedia system, which Engelbart famously demonstrated at the 1968 West Coast Joint Computer Conference. In the mid-1980s, Engelbart began speaking of the need for an Open Hyperdocument System, an open framework which would enable knowledge applications to share important functionality in an interoperable manner.    (08)

Over the next two decades, the idea for an OHS has evolved and gradually taken shape. Most recently, Engelbart proposed the development of a Hyperscope, an application that demonstrates the OHS's viewing and browsing capabilities across all types of documents -- HTML, XML, Microsoft Word, e-mail, and so on.    (09)

News    (010)

More OHS News    (011)