KMS (Hypertext)

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KMS,‭ ‬an abbreviation of Knowledge Management System,‭ ‬was a commercial second generation hypermedia system, originally created as a successor for the early hypermedia system ZOG.

The purpose of KMS was to let many users collaborate in creating and sharing information, and from the very beginning, the system was designed as a true multi-user system.

KMS might be used for practically any kind of information sharing or collaboration - including user documentation, desktop publishing, project management and even electronic communication such as electronic mail and bulletin boards.

The central element in the KMS data model is that of frames connected by links.

The frames are the hypermedia system's nodes and are always represented on-screen by a window 805 pixels high and 1132 pixels wide. The system's user interface will normally show two frames, one beside the other, so that half of each frames' width is shown.

Frames are always fixed-size, meaning scrolling is not possible. The frame model is spatial rather than character based, so that text elements and images may always be placed anywhare in the frame. Another way to say this is that empty space in the frame actually denotes space, not (as in many text editors) just the absence of characters.

In KMS, links are one way and are embedded in each frame. They may go from any text item in the source file to any destination frame. It is not possible to link to anchor points within the destination document - on the other hand, the frames are always of rather limited size.

By convention, each frame would only contain two paragraphs of text, leaving room for annotation.

KMS had two kinds of links: Tree Items and Annotation Items, corresponding to hierarchical (composition) links and references: A Tree item might, e.g., connect a table of contents and the start of a chapter, while an Annotation Item might go from the chapter to a comment made by a reader or co-author.

Script Items allowed costumization and could arguably be considered a third kind of links, since they allowed user-defined scripts to be run - these scripts would either load an existing frame or display their results in a new frame.

In KMS, there is no distinction between "read only" and "edit mode", and all users should in principle be able to edit all frames at all times. It was, however, possible to set up limitations on other users' access to the frame, and this might be controlled at the level of read access, write access and annotation access.

Possible conflicts between different users' changes were resolved through optimistic locking, which was assumed to be satisfactory since the total number of frames would always be much larger than the total number of active users, so conflicts were assumed to be rare.

[edit] References

• Akscyn, Robert M.; Donald L. McCracken and Elise A. Yoder (1988). "KMS: A distributed hypermedia system for managing knowledge in organizations". Communications of the ACM 31 (7): 820-835.