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5 Summary

Object-oriented technology provides the ability to model, to develop and to manage complex systems that cannot be easily implemented with current technology. Hypermedia systems constitute an emerging class of complex management information systems. They should facilitate distributed memory, distributed processing, and distributed knowledge on a network. An object oriented approach to hypermedia may help us achieve this goal much better than current approaches. However, research in this area is still in its infancy and there are many open issues to be investigated. Any breakthroughs in this arena will take us closer to realizing Ted Nelson’s goal, “Everything should be available to everyone. Any user should be able to follow origins and links of material across boundaries of documents, servers, networks, and individual implementations. There should be a unified environment available to everyone providing access to this whole docuverse.” [Nelson, 1991].