canales@ZELDA.LLNL.GOV (Tom Canales) (06/28/90)
I just read an article from the HYPERTEXT'89 proceedings about VNS, a a distributed hypertext virtual notebook system developed using X and Sybase at Baylor College of Medicine. I'd like to find out more about its availability but no email adress or contact info was included in the article. Anybody out there got the poop on this thing? Thanks in advance. tc
klong@wilkins.iaims.bcm.tmc.edu (Kevin Long) (06/29/90)
In article <9006272140.AA07558@zelda.llnl.gov> canales@ZELDA.LLNL.GOV (Tom Canales) writes: > >I just read an article from the HYPERTEXT'89 proceedings about VNS, a >a distributed hypertext virtual notebook system developed using X and >Sybase at Baylor College of Medicine. I'd like to find out more about >its availability but no email adress or contact info was included in >the article. Anybody out there got the poop on this thing? Thanks in >advance. > >tc We have made some substantial improvements to the VNS since the Hypertext '89 paper, and have recently learned that our National Library of Medicine funding has been extended for another five years, which will foster some major extensions to the system. To expand slightly on Tom's description above, the VNS is modeled after the biomedical researcher's notebook, with objects of various sorts arranged on pages which are arranged into notebooks. Pages are intertwined with links, and pages can be shared amongst users. We've experimented with a number of different object types, and our arsenal presently includes audio, image, and editable text objects, navigational (hypertext) links, action links (which perform actions external to the notebook (run programs)), action image or text objects (which run a program and display the results as an image or text object), and a variety of imported objects (which are really pointers to external data files). Objects can be moved around, copied, modified, etc. The intention is to create a repository for information gathered from places external to the VNS, which is why X comes in so handy, with its selection service. We've also got a set of browsers, etc. We're simplifying certain aspects of the user interface to produce a simpler, solid product to get our users more into production mode while we take a while to dive in and figure out how to make the product more generally useful, and to interpret the experiences we've gained so far. We've overdue for another publication, but I don't expect we'll have a public record of progress again until this winter, when we polish off 2.0 and discuss our plans for 3.0. We have deployed the VNS in several key biomedical workgroups at Baylor already, but as far as external distribution goes, that responsibility is being handled by a separate organization that is still in its infancy. If you're waiting to see it uploaded to expo, I don't think that's going to happen. But, to find out what is in the works as far as distribution goes, contact Andrew Burger at burger@bcm.tmc.edu. I'd be happy to try and address any other questions... Regards, Kevin Long IAIMS Development Baylor College of Medicine