Hyperwave has been developed at IICM in Graz. It started with the name Hyper-G and changed to Hyperwave when it was commercialised (If I remember properly it was in 1996).
Hyperwave is not free software. The current version, 4.1, is available at www.hyperwave.com. A time limited version can be ordered for free (30 days).
Hyperwave is an information system similar to a database (HIS, Hyperwave Information Server). Its focus is the storage and management of documents. A document can be any possible piece of data that may as well be stored in file. Each document is accompanied by its object record. The object record contains meta data for the document. The meta data is a list of attributes which can be extended by the user. Certain attributes are always set by the Hyperwave server, other may be modified by the user. An attribute is a name/value pair of the form name=value. The complete object record contains as many of those pairs as the user likes. The name of an attribute does not have to be unique, e.g. a title may appear several times within an object record. This makes sense if you want to specify a title in several languages. In such a case there is a convention, that each title value is preceded by the two letter language abbreviation followed by a colon, e.g. 'en:Title in English' or 'ge:Titel in deutsch'. Other attributes like a description or keywords are potential candidates. You may also replace the language abbreviation by any other string as long as it separated by colon from the rest of the attribute value.
Each object record has native a string representation with each name/value pair separated by a newline. The Hyperwave extension also knows a second representation which is an associated array with the attribute name being the key. Multilingual attribute values itself form another associated array with the key being the language abbreviation. Actually any multiple attribute forms an associated array with the string left to the colon in the attribute value being the key. (This is not fully implemented. Only the attributes Title, Description and Keyword are treated properly yet.)
Besides the documents, all hyper links contained in a document are stored as object records as well. Hyper links which are in a document will be removed from it and stored as individual objects, when th