6.2 MICROCOSM - A System based on Dynamic Linking
Fountain et al. [Fou90] [Car94] have implemented a system called MICROCOSM based on dynamic linking. MICROCOSM is a complete hypermedia authoring system. One of its main goals is to be open to future expansion. Its authors describe it as a "loosely coupled system with a low level of interdependency" where links are separated from data objects. This idea has lead to the concept of generic links. Generic links allow the author to associate a document with any occurrence of a partial text string in any document. Generic links are therefore not only applicable to just one document, but may be used within a whole class of documents. This means that a new plain document brought into the system may immediately contain links. For example, if "amoeba" is a link to a video about amoebas, a new document containing "amoeba" automatically inherits this link. Another important concept of MICROCOSM is the fact that there is no distinction between hypertext reader and hypertext author, i.e., readers are free to add a link at any place they wish.
Figure I.22 Following generic links in MICROCOSM
file://cosm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/ScreenCam/FALTFIND.EXE
Figure I.22 displays a MICROCOSM application. The MICROCOSM system is available for academic and non-academic users on the PC/Windows platform.
As MICROCOSM illustrates, the concept of the generic link allows one to add new plain text documents (without links) that automatically inherit any generic links that might point into the newly added documents. MICROCOSM, as described in [Fou90], does not address the problem of automatic link generation, but allows the reuse of existing, manually-created links. The Link Apprentice, described in the next section, tries to automatically compute links between related documents, based on simple string comparisons.