Composite Nodes, Contextual Links and Graphical Structural Views on the WWW

Recently, several open hypermedia systems (OHS) have proposed solutions for integrating with the World-Wide Web (WWW). The goal is to overcome WWW limitations using more powerful and sophisticated hypermedia data models while exploring the Web large distribution and standards, that permit interoperability and easy-of-use. This paper describes the integration of the HyperProp OHS with the WWW in a platform independent solution based on the Netscape browser. The integration allows: separation of links and presentation information from data content; definition of compositions (in order to structure documents, besides allowing the definition of contextual links and reuse of hypermedia structures); visualization of document structure; user navigation through graphical views; and navigation through guided tours and history trails. Particularly, the graphical views use filtering mechanisms based on extended fisheye view techniques, that avoid user disorientation when navigating through large documents. The integrated system also offers a web-site analysis tool. Based on the file system structure of web servers, the tool automatically generates compositions of HTML documents that, through the use of graphical views, help user navigation and information search on web-sites