WebLinker, a tool for managing WWW cross-references (original) (raw)

COHSE: dynamic linking of web resources

2007

Abstract This document presents a description of the COHSE collaborative research project between Sun Microsystems Laboratories and the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. The purpose of this document is to summarise the project in terms of the work completed and the results achieved.

Anchors and Paths in a Hypertext Publishing System

1993

Abstract In this paper we introduce some extensions of the anchor concept as a means to better integrate hypertext documents and allow inclusions, authoring and versioning. Many applications of the anchor concept are listed, as well as a first sketch of their use in a modification session of a document. Paths are improved as well, as a means to integrate browsers and other features like guided tours or the well-known history path; other extensions of the path concept are listed.

Processing link structures and linkbases on the web

The Web Conference, 2005

Hypertext links are an essential feature of the World Wide Web. Undoubtedly, much of the Web's success is due to HTML's linking capability. XML links, as specified in the XLink recommendation, improve on HTML's links in several ways. In particular, links after XLink can be "out-of-line" (i.e. not defined at a link source) and collected in (possibly several) linkbases. Linkbases considerably ease modeling complex link structures as encountered in context-adaptive systems (e.g. teaching systems), versatile information systems (e.g. eCommerce catalogs), and Web interfaces to systems of all kinds (e.g. eGovernment or banking interfaces). This article is devoted to two neglected aspects of XML links: the modeling of link structures and the processing of linkbases. It first shows how the modeling of link structures can be considerably improved by adding a notion of "interface" to XLink. Then, it shows that the relevant linkbase(s) might become ambiguous as a link structure is traversed. Three complementary modes for the binding of a linkbase to document(s) are proposed-"transient", "permanent", and "temporary"-as well as an algorithm for processing these bindings under the "open world linking" of the Web. Three usage scenarios are presented to demonstrate that with the approach proposed in this article the relevant linkbases are never ambiguous and the variety of behaviors required by Web applications can nicely be achieved. Finally, the relevance of XLink and the proposed linking modes to the Semantic Web is discussed.

Dynamic Linking of Web Resources: Customisation and Personalisation

2008

Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service (COHSE) provides a framework that integrates a knowledge service and the open hypermedia link service to dynamically link Web documents via knowledge resources (eg, ontologies or controlled vocabularies). The Web can be considered as a closed hypermedia system—Links on the Web are unidirectional, embedded, difficult to author and maintain.

An Object-Oriented Model (not only) for Hypertext in the Web

1998

Hypertext in the Web suffers from the poorly reversible mapping of high-level design to the resource-oriented Web implementation model. In a Web implementation, higher-level concepts such as typed links, hypertext graphs and navigation are instantiated in untyped and incoherent Web links embedded in resources. We might call this the "Hypertext gets lost in Web space" problem. This problem is well-known and leads to poor maintainability of hypertext structures in otherwise rapidly changing web applications. In particular, as maintenance of web applications is usually not any more carried out by original developers/authors but by site engineers, hypertext structural and navigational integrity is easily damaged. Recently, tools have evolved that provide a certain degree of abstraction from the resource-oriented web implementation model towards a site-oriented view. These tools, for instance FrontPage [1] and Fusion[2], support templates for groups of web pages, and in the case of Fusion explicit representation of navigational links. The site-orientation provides an overall view of web site structure but does not really support higher-level concepts, in particular not hypertext specific concepts. Approaches explicitly geared towards hypertext such as OOHDM [3] and RMM [4] are focussed on design; they can be applied to design of web applications but already implementation in the lower-level resource-oriented model, like the reuse of existing fragments, is not straightforward. Further, hypertext maintenance during web evolution can hardly be supported due to lack of coherence between design model and implementation model. Tools such as RMCase [5] overcome this problem to some extent by maintaining a design model based on RMM from which webs can be generated automatically. Maintenance then may be carried out on the higher-level representation in abstraction from the lower-level web resources. Drawbacks though are, that incremental changes can not easily be supported, and that the automated mapping from design model to web resources naturally inhibits access to implementation details (which web designers often enjoy to exploit in most curious ways). The problem of embedded links and poor maintainability of hypertext in the web is but one aspect of a general problem web engineers face: the web implementation model is semantically so poor that management and evolution of webs are very difficult. The implementation model is centered around resources. Resources are too specific and too coarse-grained as entities for reuse. Also with respect to evolution/modification, resources usually do not constitute the appropriate level of abstraction.

An open linking service supporting the authoring of web documents

Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Document engineering - DocEng '02, 2002

Both content driven web authors and application designers may have their attention deviated from their main task when they have to be concerned with the generation of elaborated linking structures. This work aims to demonstrate how a metadata-enhanced web-based open linking service can be exploited towards supporting content driven authors in their tasks. The following results are presented in this paper: (a) the Web Linking Service (WLS), a novel open hypermedia system that stores and exchanges metadata in RDF standard syntax for hypertext structures across the wire and (b) two case studies in which applications offer to their users the ability to create linking structures upon existing contents by making use the WLS service.

Virtual WWW Documents: a Concept to Explicit the Structure of WWW Sites

1999

This paper shows a new concept of a virtual WWW document (VWD), as a set of WWW pages representing a logical information space, generally dealing with one particular domain. The VWD is described using metadata in the XML syntax and will be accessed through a metadata.class file, stored at the root level of WWW sites. We'll suggest how the VWD can improve information retrieval on the WWW and reduce the network load generated by the robots. We describe a prototype implemented in JAVA, within an application in the environmental domain. The exchanges of such metadata lay in a flexible architecture based on two kinds of robots : generalists and specialists that collect and organize this metadata, in order to localize the resources on the WWW. They will contribute to the overall auto-organizing information process by exchanging their indices, therefore forwarding their knowledge each other.

Dynamic hyperlink inclusion in online journals

1995

SUMMARY The two complementary de facto standards for the publication of electronic documents are HTML on the World Wide Web and Adobe's Acrobat viewers using PDF (Portable Document Format). A brief overview is given of these two systems followed by an analysis of why the embedded, and very concrete, nature of their hypertext links leads to great problems with keeping the 'hyperstructure' up to date. An SGML-based syntax is presented, adapted from that used in the Microcosm system, which allows links and other hypertextual material to be kept in an abstract form in separate link bases. The links can then be interpreted or compiled at any stage and applied, in the correct format to some specific representation such as HTML or PDF. This approach is of great value in keeping hyperlinks relevant, up-to-date and in a com- mon link-base which is independent of the finally delivered electronic document format. Four models are discussed for allowing publishers to insert links int...

Semantics of Links and Document Structure Discovery

2015

This paper presents a novel algorithm to discover the hier-archical document structure by classifying the links between the document pages. This link classication adds metadata to the links that can be expressed using Resource Descrip-tion Framework Syntax [7]. Several well-known programs automatically generate HTML web pages from dierent doc-ument formats such as LaTeX, Powerpoint, Word, etc. Our interest is in the intertwined HTML web pages generated by the LaTeX2HTML program [6]. We use the web robot of the WWWPal System [11] to save the structure of the web document in a webgraph. Then the web analyzer of the sys-tem applies our algorithm to discover the semantics of the links and infer the hierarchical structure of the document. 1.