Towards collaborative design in an open hypermedia environment

Open hypermedia systems hold significant potential to facilitate the development of collaborative design applications. In particular, it is the flexible approach utilized by these systems to provide infrastructure services, their ability to accommodate alternative hypermedia domains, and their facilities for information integration across application boundaries that give open hypermedia systems this potential. Current open hypermedia systems, however, have not realized their full potential to support collaborative design. They lack capabilities in one or more of these important areas. Improvements are especially needed in the collaborative infrastructure services provided by open hypermedia systems and in their support for alternative hypermedia domains. A prototype open hypermedia system is currently being extended to address these shortcomings of existing systems.