Toolkit for shared hypermedia on a distributed object oriented architecture

We present a toolkit and architecture for supporting networked shared (multi-user) hypermedia applications. The toolkit supports a rich set of media types: text, graphics, pictures, live and pre-recorded sound, and live and pre-recorded video. Hypermedia links can be anchored to any media type and refer to nodes which contain media items. Nodes provide for abstractions such as pages, cards and general information networks. Media information can be accessed and changed by several users. The toolkit is realised as a class library on a distributed object oriented language based on C. The concurrent and distributed features of the underlying architecture provide for multi-users. Issues of sharing, version management and access control are addressed by considering database extensions to the object oriented architecture. Support for networking of continuous media streams is provided by extensions to the underlying runtime system. The toolkit has been used to develop and support conference and groupware applications.