Investigating the impact of Web 2.0 techniques on integrating open hypermedia services into the World Wide Web

Open hypermedia systems (OHSs) provide hypermedia middleware to allow users to connect information across documents and machines. OHSs have supported a wide range of hypermedia features including link creation and traversal, guided tours, annotations/discussions, and structural/spatial hypermedia techniques. However, the global-scale design of the World Wide Web encouraged its rapid adoption and deployment, turning it into the world's largest hypertext system despite offering a paucity of hypertext services.;As the hypertext services of the Web were inferior to the services found in OHSs, the open hypermedia community saw an opportunity to integrate their ideas and systems with the Web. Projects such as Walden's Paths, Chimera, and Arakne in the late 90s have shown that such integration is possible. Unfortunately each of these projects faced some difficulties and set backs that, in some cases, reduced the final system's functionality or performance. Some of these issues included security restrictions placed on Java applets and JavaScript, performance of applet communication to servers, platform dependencies and browser dependencies.;The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the current challenges faced when integrating OHS functionality with today's Web using recent techniques collectively known as "Web 2.0." To explore this issue space, a prototype system called QuickLink was created using a SOAP web service to act as an OHS and a Firefox plug-in to facilitate the integration of OHS services into the user interface of a web browser using Web 2.0 techniques. QuickLink implements link creation and traversal as well as guided tours. To evaluate the success of QuickLink and the advantages that Web 2.0 technologies provide to OHS integration, critical comparisons to existing systems were made.