Hyper-G

Hyper-G is a publishing system with hypertext features more advanced than those available with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and today's Web browser . Hyper-G was inspired in part by the ideas of Ted Nelson, who coined the term "hypertext," and was developed in Graz, Austria, by a team of researchers at the Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media ( IICM ) and the Institute for HyperMedia Systems (IHM) of Joanneum Research. Assistance was provided by developers elsewhere.

Using Hyper-G:

• You can have bi-directional links between HTML pages (or other hypertext documents). That is, you can know for any page what other HTML pages (including those at other Web sites) link to the page. The latter kind of link is known as a backlink .
• You can create link types (for example, for a single link, you might have one type called "definition" and another link type called "picture").
• Links can be defined as separate objects or files, allowing them to be easily filtered or changed for an entire document or set of files.
• One link type can be an annotation that an editor or a reviewer can create or modify. Thus, a number of collaborating reviewers or writers can share each others comments, made visible by the links they create.
• Links can overlap each other. For example, "client-server" could contain a link for "client," for "server," and another for the term "client-server" as a whole.
• The structure of a document can be viewed graphically and even in 3-D.
• The author can control who can see a document, who can see a link, who can edit the document, and who can edit the links.

Hyper-G is available in a commercial version called HyperWave. HyperWave consists of a server and clients that run on Windows and UNIX platforms. A version for Macintosh is in preparation. The most advanced client is the UNIX version; it can be run on Linux systems. HyperWave is compatible with HTML .

Among other applications, HyperWave has ideal features for online peer or technical reviews and collaborative writing. Among the early users of Hyper-G or derivative versions were Oxford University Press and the European Space Agency.