KMS

In 1972, a team at Carnegie-Mellon University began development on ZOG (the name does not appear to be an acronym). In 1983, this system was installed on board the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, using twenty-eight networked PERQ workstations. It provided the crew with a task management system and on-line procedure manuals. Two of the principal ZOG researchers, Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn, formed Knowledge Systems in 1981, and began work on a commercial product, Knowledge Management System (KMS). This was implemented as a distributed database using Sun and Apollo workstations, computers possessing high-resolution graphic displays. The software has been documented most thoroughly in "KMS: A Distributed Hypermedia System for Managing Knowledge in Organizations" by Akscyn, McCracken, and Yoder.

KMS is based on an extremely simple paradigm. Each screen may display either one frame (node) or two frames side by side (as in the Memex). Nodes may contain text and graphics. Reference and command links are available--these are indicated by a hollow or solid bullet. Two link types are available. Tree links indicate hierarchical or structural relationships; annotation links indicate associative relationships. The latter are denoted by having "@" as their first character.

The user interface is most notable for what it does not have: pull-down menus, buttons, windows, and so on.

KMS today is the result of rethinking many user interface design issues. Mostly, this has meant learning to do without things that previously seemed so necessary to us. We are trying to provide the KMS user with an environment in which there are few concepts to learn. (829)

The following list illustrates this concept:

• only one command context is available; no distinction is made between editing, viewing, and navigating
• anchors are not highlighted; they may be separated from other text by whitespace to indicate the special status of this text.
• scrolling is not provided, since quick navigation between frames is seen as a more efficient substitute
• nodes are not typed
• no clipboard is necessary, since items may be moved directly
• destination anchors are not provided because frames themselves are small enough logical units
• link properties are not required since one can just as easily follow the link as view its descriptors
• no maps are provided, as they are not judged to be worth the extra complexity

Actions are initiated through the use of a three-button mouse. The on-screen pointer changes depending on its location to indicate available actions. In this way selection, block editing, and navigation functions are all provided without need for a menuing system. Additional global commands are available from a single line at the bottom of the screen. On-line help, importing, clusters, and versioning are all provided. Simple searches can be made on particular hierarchies of nodes. The results are displayed as a frame. A general-purpose scripting language, similar in scope to HyperTalk, is available.

KMS has accomplished its developers' goal of providing full hypertext functionality with a minimum of overhead. Along with Intermedia, it is the most highly developed hypertext system. The two stand poles apart, however, in their interface model.