Distributed information and control in a concurrent hypermedia-oriented architecture

The market for parallel and distributed computing systems keeps growing. Technological advances in processor power, networking, telecommunication and multimedia are stimulating the development of applications requiring parallel and distributed computing. An important research problem in this area is the need to find a robust bridge between the decentralization of knowledge sources in information-based systems and the distribution of computational power. Consequently, the attention of the research community has been directed towards high-level, concurrent, distributed programming. This work proposes a new hypermedia framework based on the metaphor of the actor model. The storage and run-time layers are represented entirely as communities of independent actors that cooperate in order to accomplish common goals, such as version management or user adaptivity. These goals involve fundamental and complex hypermedia issues, which, thanks to the distribution of tasks, are treated in an efficient and simple way.