As We May Link: A General Metamodel for Hypermedia Systems

Abstract

Many hypermedia models have been proposed, including those specifically developed to model navigational aspects of web sites. But few hypermedia systems have been implemented based on metamodelling principles familiar to the database community. Often there is no clear separation between conceptual and technical issues in the models and their implementations are not based on an explicit representation of a metamodel. This results in a loss of generality and uniformity across systems. Based on principles of metamodel-driven system development, we have implemented a platform that can support various categories of hypermedia systems through the generality and extensibility of the metamodel. We present our metamodel and show how it generalises concepts present in a range of hypermedia and link server systems.

A model and architecture for open cross-media annotation and link services

“…In the past, we have designed such a general crossmedia link metamodel called the resource-selector-link (RSL) model [17]. In this paper, we show how an annotation service has been realized based on the RSL model and discuss the required architecture to support extensibility, not only on the model layer, but also on the link authoring and rendering level.…”

“…The presented annotation model is actually an application and extension of our more general resource-selector-link (RSL) model [17] for cross-media linking as shown in Fig. 4.…”

“…Note that these two windows always show the output of a single visual plug-in and complex documents consisting of multiple media types can currently only be visualized if this is supported by the corresponding visual plug-in. In the future, we plan to make use of the RSL model's structural link features [17] to metamodel complex composite cross-media document structures and visualize them in a generic way. The authoring tool will only have to know how to render the structural relationship between different components whereas each individual resource is rendered based on its visual plug-in.…”

A Framework for Link Sharing in Cooperative Cross-Media Information Spaces

“…The iServer framework offers a general cross-media link service capable of supporting an extensible set of digital or physical media and various kinds of applications. The framework is based on the RSL metamodel [8] and enables the integration of new media types based on a resource plug-in mechanism as indicated in Fig. 2.…”

Producing Interactive Paper Documents Based on Multi-Channel Content Publishing

“…Note that the general link functionality offered by iServer supports links with multiple sources as well as multiple targets. Through the generality of the underlying link metamodel [13], even links with other links as sources or targets can be defined. A user management component is integrated into the core of the system.…”