Developer Support in Open Hypermedia Systems: Towards a Hypermedia Service Discovery Mechanism

Abstract

This paper argues that the open hypermedia research community should focus on the developer support issue. An enabling step to this target is the provision of an effective and easy-to-use hypermedia service discovery mechanism. The inexistence of such kind of mechanism, for finding and using hypermedia services, amongst the Open Hypermedia Systems (OHSs) is one of the main reasons for their narrow publicity and usage. Aiming to the improvement of the third party (hypermedia-unaware) developer support, the hypermedia service discovery mechanism will boost the OHS usage by providing a standard platform and a set of tools in order to enable the enhancement of third party applications with hypermedia functionality. © Springer-Verlag 2004.