ABSTRACT
Future hypermedia systems will integrate diverse information resources, systems, and technologies. They will be based on modular architectures (e.g., Thompson, 1990) that separate orthogonal concerns into plug-compatible components such as change management, query and content search, notification, application-specific concurrency control, computational semantics, and window conferencing. Some of these components, such as change management, may be highly dependent on the semantics of a particular domain, whereas others will provide general support for all applications.
The key point… is that it is modular and open. This modularity is based on the observations that the functions the modules perform are independent of each other, that is orthogonality implies modularity.
(Thompson, 1990, p. 234)