Visual Definition of Virtual Documents for the World-Wide Web

Abstract. Trying to support the presentation of large amounts of heteroge-neous data on the World-Wide Web normally results in relocating and restruc-turing the original data. Our approach avoids these disadvantages by generating metadata imposing an arbitrary logical structure on existing and new data. This paper proposes a new high-level visual language as a user-friendly means to control the process of generating metadata, i.e., information repositories. The language has been designed to be useful even for unexperienced users. Its applicability is demonstrated by a real example, creating a repository of judicial opinions from publicly available raw data. Information technology is expected to expand faster than any other technology in his-tory. Large amounts of data are already available on international data-networks, e.g., the Internet and in particular the World-Wide Web (WWW). Two main categories o