The following is a tutorial for Chimera 2.0 Beta .
Welcome to Chimera, the only freely available open hypermedia system in existence. Chimera allows your applications to linked together through a series of hypermedia links, even when the items you wish to link are plain ASCII text or images.
The purpose of this tutorial is to give you a set of example which demonstrate how you can download and use Chimera. The tutorial is divided between two parts: Part 1 gives an example of how download and run Chimera, Part 2 demonstrates some features of Chimera. This tutorial will not provide examples on all of Chimera's features -- other documentation is available which discusses Chimera's features in more depth.
This first part of the tutorial is for all users of Chimera. The example below will show you the basics in how to set up Chimera, run it, and then to run a client application which will demonstrate creation of anchors, links, and a link traversal.
Chimera 2.0 has features which allow you create more complex hypermedia relationships than the simple link of the example in Part 1. In the second part of this tutorial you are given sets of examples which demonstrate some but not all of Chimera's features. These examples build on each other so you may have to review the example in Part 1 in order to set up your system for the examples.
Chimera supports n-ary links. An n-ary link means that your anchors can be grouped by links that can have as many anchors as you wish connected with them. This is not the case with HTML where links are one-way. We believe that n-ary links will allow you to group related information together there by aiding you in managing complex relationships between the items you link together.
You may use Jimage to see an example of how to make an n-ary link. This example will create an anchor on a new image, connect it to the link you made with bill.gif and earthrise.gif in the previous example. You will then traverse this link by using Jimage.
Chimera 2.0 allows for hierarchical hyperwebs. In Chimera, the notion of a hyperweb is a grouping of hypermedia concepts which are related to each other. These concepts are part of Chimera's hypermedia model of the world. For more information about Chimera concepts follow this link for a technical overview of Chimera concepts.
The two examples below show how the hyperwebs, which are organized hierarchically in Chimera can be used to form different contexts for the items you hook together and can be used to pass on information from one hyperweb to another.
Switching from one Hyperweb to another changes the context of hypermedia relationships you have in them. The following example shows how this context switching can be used.
Chimera 2.0 allows you to pass on anchor and link information to another web through the creation of subwebs. When you create a subweb of a web, the subweb inherits all the anchors and links of the parent web. In this example, you will inherit the anchors and link from the previous example's flight_web.
You can import or export the Chimera databases of a Website through the Import and Export functions found on the Hyperweb Server. You may use these functions as means to store different states of your Chimera Website through time. Chimera 2.0 uses XML as the format for the files.
Chimera allows you to launch applications to complete Link traversals. In order to to this, you must have a file configured in your home directory. This file indicates what program to launch for a specific traversal event. This file may be configured to suit your system.