Building a hypermedia information system on the Internet

Sun Microsystems Computer Inc. (SMI) introduced an easy access and fast retrieval hypermedia information system on the Internet in April 1994. The hypermedia information system is designed to provide Sun´s present and potential customers with easily accessible up-to-date, sales, marketing, product and service information worldwide. The SMI information system on the Internet is an application of the World Wide Web (WWW), a hypermedia information retrieval system developed at CERN in Switzerland. The interface used to access the information on the WWW is Mosaic. Mosaic is a graphical browser to the WWW with additional support for Gopher, WAIS, Archie, GNN, ftp, telnet and http services on the Internet. Mosaic provides a common client application interface to the vast Internet resources. The paper focuses on the design of the hypermedia information system with Mosaic interface for the SMI Internet Web server. The system is designed to allow users to navigate along various information paths according to individual user´s needs. In addition, the paper discusses the authoring and conversion of information to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the implementation of the SMI Web Sewer and summarizes some of the lessons learned during the development and early implementation of the SMI hypermedia information system