KMS, an abbreviation of Knowledge Management System, was a commercial second generation hypermedia system, originally created as a successor for the early hypermedia system ZOG. KMS was developed by Don McCracken and Rob Akscyn of Knowledge Systems, a 1981 spinoff from the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The purpose of KMS was to let many users collaborate in creating and sharing information within large, shared hypertext, and from the very beginning, the system was designed as a true multi-user system. As a spatial hypermedia system, KMS was intended to represent all forms of explicit 'knowledge artifacts' such as presentations, documents, databases, and software programs, as well as common forms of electronic communication ( electronic mail, community bulletin boards, blogs). The central element in the KMS data model is that of screen-sized pages (called "frames") interconnected by links. The user had the option (at any time) of switching between a view of a single frame (good for large, landscape-oriented diagrams) or two side-by-side half-screen views (suitable for two portrait-sized pages).
Finally, KMS contained a script programming language (akin to JavaScript) which enabled developers and users to extend the system beyond its current functionality. In keeping with the KMS philosophy of 'Everything a frame' (e. g., cursors, fillpatterns, etc., are represented as frames) so programs are also represented as hierarchies of frames; KMS dynamically read and interpreted only those program frames needed at runtime. KMS was originally written in Pascal and C, roughly 300, 000 lines of code in size. A more modern, Java -based follow-on to KMS (called "Expeditee") is being developed at the Computer Science Department of the University of Waikato in New Zealand, by Rob Akscyn, one of the original developers of KMS. References [ edit] Akscyn, Robert M; McCracken, Donald L; Yoder, Elise A (1988). "KMS: A distributed hypermedia system for managing knowledge in organizations". Communications of the ACM. 31 (7): 820–35. doi: 10. 1145/48511. 48513.