Hypertext News

Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award

The Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award is given for best paper presented at the annual ACM SIGWEB Hypertext Conference. The award is named after Douglas C. Engelbart, in recognition of his life's work and contributions to the field of hypertext and hypermedia.

This years winner was m. c. schraefel with the paper What is an analogue for the semantic web and why is having one important?. This paper postulates that for the Semantic Web to grow and gain input from fields that will surely benefit it, it needs to develop an analogue that will help people not only understand what it is, but what the potential opportunities are that are enabled by these new protocols. The model proposed in the paper takes the way that Web interaction has been framed as a baseline to inform a similar analogue for the Semantic Web. While the Web has been represented as a Page + Links, the paper presents the argument that the Semantic Web can be conceptualized as a Notebook + Memex. The argument considers how this model also presents new challenges for fundamental human interaction with computing, and that hypertext models have much to contribute to this new understanding for distributed information systems.

The Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award was presented by Dr Mark Bernstein. Unfortunately m. c. schraefel was unable to attend the award ceremony and so Professor Wendy Hall received the award on her behalf.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1286240.1286271

Labels: Awards, Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award, m. c. schraefel