Information on Hyperscope

Eugene Kim has posted a good Intro to Hyperscope blog post on the official Hyperscope blog:

"Welcome once again to our blog! We've been working for about six weeks now, getting the team together and the process worked out, and we're now working through the design. So now's as good a time as any to introduce the project to the wider world.

The Hyperscope is Doug Engelbart's latest project to bring his ideas to the wider world. But before we can describe the Hyperscope, we must first describe the Open Hyperdocument System (OHS). Doug first conceived of the OHS in the early 1990s as a system that brought the advanced hypertext features of his original hypertext system (NLS/Augment) to the masses. With an OHS, we would be able to use any tool to generate granular links into and apply special "view specs" on any file format. The OHS would give us interoperability between any and all knowledge tools. Moreover, it would serve as a launching point for Doug's "bootstrapping" ideas -- specifically, his strategy for boosting society's collective ability to solve its most complex problems.

Doug conceived of the Hyperscope in 2000 as an intermediary step towards achieving the vision of an OHS. The Hyperscope would implement basic jumping and viewing capabilities across multiple file formats, using translators to transform existing file formats into the appropriate format. Think of Hyperscope as OHS without editing capabilities.

Thanks to some funding from the NSF, we're able to start building a Hyperscope. As a first stage, we're reimplementing Augment's jumping and viewing capabilities into the Firefox (and perhaps beyond) browser, using AJAX and other modern technologies. Our goal is to have this work complete by the end of 2006. The project is open source and the work will be licensed under the GPL.
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