WOnDA: an Extensible Multi-platform Hypermedia Design Model

The design and development of hypermedia applications that are deployed on the Web and other delivery platforms is largely conducted on an intuitive, ad hoc basis, thus resulting in inefficient systems that are hard to modify, maintain and port to alternative platforms. There are now justifiable research and development efforts that attempt to formalize the engineering process of such systems in order to achieve certain quality attributes like modifiability, maintainability and portability. This paper presents such an attempt for designing a conceptual model of a hypermedia application that allows for easy update and alteration of its content as well as its presentation and also allows for deployment in various platforms. In specific this model explicitly separates the hypermedia content from its presentation to the user, by employing XML content storage and XSL transformations. Our work is based upon the empirical results of designing, developing and deploying hypermedia applications in various platforms, and on the practices of well-established hypermedia engineering techniques.