HyperScope, Gurus, and Free Lunches

Old editors never die, they just turn into "project liaisons" and "collaboration gurus." Old Dr. Dobb's editors anyway.

Of course, former Dr. Dobb's editor Eugene Eric Kim is a long way from the blue-hair and assisted-living crowd. But he is officially known as "project liaison and collaboration guru" for Doug Engelbart's recently launched HyperScope 1.0 project.

HyperScope is a Web-based implementation of Engelbart's 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System)--"a high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways" so as to "make more advanced browsing capabilities available in existing tools, and to engage community participation."

More specifically:

HyperScope gives you the ability to change how you view a document... and how you address parts of a document. You can embed viewspecs in an address, and you can use these addresses to link to or jump around a document.

For example, every paragraph in a HyperScope document has a location number, an address corresponding to the paragraph's location in a document. For example, the second paragraph in the top-level of a document has the location number 2. To link to this paragraph, you can use the address:

http://foo/bar.opml#2

To jump directly to the second paragraph while viewing a document, you can click on the Jump button, type 2, and press Apply.

You can see the location numbers for every paragraph, you can click Viewspecs, check the Numbering checkbox, and click on Apply. You'll notice that this view corresponds with the viewspec m. To link to the second paragraph of the document with numbering turned on, you can use the address:

http://foo/bar.opml#2:m

You can also jump to this particular paragraph and view by clicking on Jump and typing 2:m.

Rather than trying to explain and understand this, it's probably better just to run the HyperScope demo, or just download the system from the HyperScope site.

It is also interesting that HyperScope is implements Englebart's Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) which is now in Version 2.0 draft specification (written by Dave Winer).

The purpose of the format is "to provide a way to exchange information between outliners and Internet services that can be browsed or controlled through an outliner."

To be truthful, I'm still sorting through all this to understand what it is about. That said, I tend to pay attention to the stuff that Englebart comes up with since it always ends up being both interesting and important.

If nothing else, I'll try to find out from Eugene Kim what a "collaboration guru" is and does. Alas, knowing Eugene the way I do, it will probably mean a free lunch for him and a padded expense tab for me.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:15 AM  Permalink