The study of history is not only the study of the primary sources; it is also the study of the thoughts of historians. There is a need to study webs of relationships built by different historians in a way that is practical, flexible, reusable, and useful over time. The authors present the importance of relationships in historical analysis and explain the inability of current hypertext systems to capture the relationships among the objects the writing is about.

The HyTime standard is presented briefly. The authors are particularly interested in how HyTime links represent typed relationships; they distinguish anchors in HyTime terms from those in the Dexter model. Basic HyTime constructs such as the “finite coordinate space” are summarized.

In the main part of the paper, the authors give examples of the links that are needed in historical analysis, which requires analyzing connections among events and the documentary evidence of events. They present examples in HyTime syntax to show how hyperlinks can be richly descriptive of the relationships historians establish. Since time plays an important role in the study of history, the authors focus on how the timeline can become an anchor point to which other information objects can be linked using HyTime linking and location methods, allowing the building of complex sets of time-based relationships.

The paper is well written, clear, and concise. The ideas presented have not been implemented, but the authors say that the implementation of a system is trivial.