Beyond the PDF

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 20, 2011 at 09:00 PM

In this age of wikinomics the PDF seems like steam powered technology at best. However, I assume that it has flourished largely due to its convenience for intellectual rights management. That is probably the reason that major academic publishing houses support it, so that one can find most papers in PDF format in the first place.

When I first entered the university more than twenty years ago, I would have been eternally grateful for access to journals in PDF form. More recently, during my MBA experience, I wasn’t so impressed; I suppose that I expect much more nowadays, simply because I know that much more is possible.

I can think of at least one historical effort to provide a structured document format, facilitating knowledge organisation and retrieval, namely Doug Engelbart’s Hyperscope http://hyperscope.org/ see also http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html I’m sure there have been others.