Specialized systems aiming at offering hypertext functionality in users' computing have been discussed since the early days of hypertext. However, with the claim to also support other structure domains than node-link structures, hypertext systems had to overcome some challenges. Researchers came up with component-based approaches and low level structure services.
Due to the raising omnipresence of the Web, research on traditional hypertext systems has been fading out over the past decade. This paper focuses again on hypertext infrastructures and goes beyond ongoing Web discussions. Based on lessons learned from well thought through previous work, we present a novel design for multi-structure supporting, general purpose hypertext systems that can be used in a series of application domains. The system provides intelligence analysis which is needed for sophisticated user support. We argue that this lets us use the hypertext system also as a visual analytics tool. Furthermore, for demonstration purposes we describe the use of the system in combination with a Web-based software engineering platform, which is part of the ongoing project ODIN.

Spatial hypertext represents associations between chunks of information by spatial or visual attributes (such as proximity, color, shape, etc.). This supports expressing information structures implicitly and in an intuitive way. However, automatic recognition of such informal, implicitly encoded structures by a machine (a so-called spatial parser) is still a challenge. Conventional parsers are conceptually restricted by their underlying source of information. Due to this limitation there are various possible structures that cannot be recognized properly, as the machine has no means to detect them. This inevitably limits both the quality of parser output and hence parser performance. In this paper we show that considering temporal aspects in spatial parser design will lead to significant increase in parsing accuracy, detection of richer structures and thus higher parser performance. We call machines that consider such spatial and temporal information spatio-temporal parsers.

For the purpose of providing evidence, parsers for recognizing spatial, visual, and temporal object relations have been implemented and tested in a series of user surveys. One aim was to find out how "close" the machine interpretetation of structures get to human interpretation. It turned out that in none of the test cases pure spatial or visual parser could outperform the spatio-temporal parser. Instead, the spatio-temporal parser was able to compensate limitations of conventional parsers. Furthermore, we have statistically tested parsing accuracy. The results indicate a non-trivial effect that is recognizable by humans. This shows that spatio-temporal parsers produce output that is significantly closer to what knowledge workers intend to express compared to traditional spatial parsers.

As multitouch phones and tablets become more popular, multitouch technologies receive increasing attention. The underlying interaction paradigm of such devices is the space on which objects are manipulated by the user's fingertips. It is natural that hypertext narratives find their way from primarily mouse-driven interaction to spatial structures and visually rich presentations. In this article we propose three features for multitouch hypertext narrative applications: (i) Native multitouch support and direct manipulations of fictive objects; (ii) using the space as a structuring mechanism rather than a means for presentation; and (iii) supporting presentation of visually rich objects. Our prototype, TouchStory, is a novel tool specialized for authoring and reading hypertext narratives that integrates these features.