The Future

An open hypermedia system like Microcosm has an intrinsically different feel from closed hypermedia systems. In Microcosm, the onus can be on the user to interrogate the system for more information rather than the system announcing the existence of more information about a particular subject. The infinitely more flexible model of open systems allows us to customize the hypertext environment by creating links dynamically, based on database or other information query tools for example. We can also apply links to other desktop information processing tools and we can define processes to automatically generate links, which significantly eases the authoring effort and makes it possible to build very large systems.