Fourth Annual Workshop

Thursday, August 22, 1996 npuc95@almaden.ibm.com

	"Generalized Links, Micropayment and Transcopyright" Ted Nelson Professor Keio University Fujisawa, Japan

	| Abstract | Biography |

Abstract The World Wide Web is like karaoke -- anyone can do it. But it is a flashing arcade of changing shop windows, a foam of ever-popping bubbles. What we still need are stable publishing, links that can be followed in both directions, a variety of link types, a micropayment system for buying small parts of documents at a time for very, very small amounts of money, a copyright system permitting republishing of unrestricted quotations, and a way for documents to change without invalidating connections to them. These have always been the goals of Project Xanadu; our new methods turn our old methods inside-out for today's Internet environment. Biography Ted Nelson is presently a Professor at Keio University in Fujisawa, Japan. His previous positon was as a Research Fellow at the Sapporo HyperLab and Hokkaido University. He is a software designer, writer and film-maker who for thirty-five years has been pursuing the vision he had in 1960 -- a world of universal digital media with a special logic structure, where all media objects can be quoted freely, seen side-by-side and connected side-by-side (transparallel viewing). Nelson is best known for coining the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" (1965) and predicting vast anarchic network publishing, but today's World Wide Web is only part of what he has sought to build. In Nelson's proposal for Universal Transmedia, there are two fundamental types of connection: Links, or connections between differeing objects and Transclusions, or connections between things which are The Same. Nelson insists that tranclusions are a vtal complement to links, the equivalent of being able to put an object in different places at once. A proper transclusive system will allow any portion of media to be re-used and republished in many places by anyone, and intercompared in leagues of Project Xanadu pioneered in issues of distributed hypermedia, distributed documets and evolving edit systems. It can be argued that HyperCard, World Wide Web, Lotus Notes and much of "multimedia" all derive from this work. Nelson's theories of software center around arbitrary Virtuality, which he divides into conceptual structure and feel. He condemns “metaphors” as presently used, and instead advocated the design of deep new construct logics.

	Presented by Almaden Research Center - Computer Science and User System Ergonomics Research.
	This workshop has limited space and is open to contributors in related fields. If you would like to attend, please send a position statement to: npuc95@almaden.ibm.com by August 16, 1996.

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