Evolving hypermedia systems: a layered software architecture

Abstract

Hypermedia systems are evolutionary in nature. This paper presents SEM‐HP, a model based on a semantic, systemic and evolutionary perspective, which facilitates the management of hypermedia evolution during the whole lifecycle process. Following the model the architecture of hypermedia systems can be conceived as composed of three sub‐systems (conceptual, presentation and navigation) and two abstraction levels, the system level and the meta level (the first used by the reader and the second by the designer). The objective of this division is to achieve a good separation of concerns both in the development and in the evolution processes and to obtain a better understanding, thus facilitating the further development of tools. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An author tool based on SEM-HP for the creation and evolution of adaptive hypermedia systems

“…The author is also given the option to modify the default order rules by adding other prerequisites which are only based on the user's navigation history. There is more information about this subsystem in [6].…”

“…Software is always evolving, and we must assure that this evolution keeps the system in a suitable state. This is done on the basis of the work presented in [14], as described in [6].…”

“…In this paper we present a tool based on the SEM-HP model [6,9] that allows the development of semantic, adaptive and evolutionary hypermedia systems. It takes into account the evolution of the hypermedia system order to assure that it is done properly, and it also addresses the disorientation and cognitive overhead problems by applying several adaptive techniques.…”