The hypertext paradigm has been applied to a biological research problem to study the energetics model of Cassin's Sparrows [Schnase & Leggett, 1989]. This model tracked the daily energy expenditure of individual, adult sparrows. The computations and book-keeping activities associated with the simulation of the model and the analysis of field data were performed in an integrated hypertext environment using KMS on Sun workstations. Apart from hypertext related activities such as browsing, authoring, and annotating, researchers could write and run simulation programs. The resulting tables and figures could be integrated into the hypertext. This research proved that computational hypertext is appropriate for scientific applications, management of personal and group information, and community scholarship.
Attorneys need a powerful information processing facility to gather information about cases, cross-reference them appropriately, retrieve them at great speed during trials and represent their ideas efficiently. They also need tools to make notes in a courtroom which can be shared with other attorneys to work on cases more effectively. In one law firm, it was found that all these activities could not be managed and linked even though there were a plethora of systems for word processing, electronic mail, billing, file management, and relational databases. Hypertext was used in this law firm to efficiently manage information about intellectual property. A system called HyperLex was developed using KMS to assimilate intellectual property information from various sources such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets [Yoder & Wettach, 1989]. Information collected in this manner was properly organized, and cross-referenced to produce legal contracts, patent applications, court briefs and motions, and legal advice to clients. The system also provided links to group bulletin boards, calendars, employment agreements, and information on other previously published works. This system was used to catalog documents for a trial in which more than 10,000 documents had to be managed.
World Wide Web (W3) is a hypertext-based information retrieval mechanism providing information access across heterogeneous platforms mainly connected over Internet [Berners-Lee, 1992]. It is based on the philosophy that information should be freely available to anyone. We can say that it is a small step towards Nelson's vision of a docuverse. The W3 architecture has allowed many existing hypertext systems and information bases to be incorporated as part of the web by gateway servers. W3 was developed for High Energy Physicists at CERN to share information with their counterparts across the rest of the academic community. It has now been extended to cover over 80 topics from Aeronautics to Social Sciences. W3 is based on a client/server architecture and the information (subject files) can reside anywhere on the network. Browsers use the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and they can be installed at local sites to access remote webs. Each browser can handle, at a minimum, plain text as well as simple SGML formats.
Hypertext can be used to prototype the user interface for any interactive system since horizontal prototyping (look and feel) involves designing windows (treated as nodes) and linking them together through menus and buttons and presenting the entire interface as a set of navigation paths [Nielsen, 1990].
Organizational hypermedia is hypermedia technology applied to the information processing needs of an organization where information is shared among individuals [Isakowitz, 1993]. Daft and Lengel had stated that uncertainty and equivocality are two problems faced by present-day organizations. Hence, they acquire more information in order to reduce uncertainty. However, this does not solve the problem of equivocality or ambiguity inherent in organizational tasks. Minimization of equivocality requires face-to-face discussions and rich exchange of views among decision makers. Both uncertainty and equivocality can be reduced by employing hypermedia functionality in organizational information systems. Since hypermedia provides the structural mechanisms to manage complex relationships between various pieces of information, it can support equivocality reduction (similar to CMC systems). However, experiments are required to support these theories. Similar to group memory in a collaborative system, an organization manages information in a repository called "organizational memory". Organizational memories contain entities such as facts, positions, and events which are highly suitable for hypertext representation. However, hypermedia systems should address some of the problems associated with organizational memory such as pollution, growth, waste, restructuring, interoperability, and flexibility.
The following are some of the research issues related to organizational hypermedia: