EXTERNAL ANCHORING FOR WIDE-AREA NETWORK SUPPORT - THE RHYTHM PROJECT

A major step in future hypertext systems, will be that of providing some of the interactivity characteristics of small scale centralised collaborative hypertext systems to larger scale, widely distributed ones such as WWW. Particularly important, as often asserted, is allowing free linking to all users, which may pose severe scale problems unless specific design decisions are taken. One design that is completely scalable is storing links' anchors externally of the nodes they refer to and obtaining correctly updated information by relying on automatic versioning for all nodes. The RHYTHM hypertext system is a highly distributable hypertext system based on this premise. It provides free link, annotation, inclusion and customisation facilities to all users, creating an integrated environment for public and private document. Modularity and expandability in the services provided to the users is also an important part of the RHYTHM project, whose approach is based on allowing additional managers to be included in the client application in order to carry out specific tasks or handle specific data types.