Hyperbook Data Modeling

While schema descriptions are a necessity for large database applications, many current hypermedia applications have been developed without semantic modeling. Addressing these shortcomings several modeling techniques for hypermedia systems have been developed recently, which extend known domain modeling techniques from the database and software engineering field with dedicated constructs for specifying possibilities of navigation.

The current paper presents a more general modeling framework for hyperbooks, which extends previous work by representing all aspects of a hyperbook application in a declarative data model. Domain model, navigational model, user model and visualization model are all captured in a unified meta data model. This explicit, complete model of the application allows for a reusable implementation. We finish by presenting a fully generic client/server architecture for displaying the hyperbook from a WWW server to a WWW client.