The Aristotle Approach to Open Hypermedia

Large-scale distributed hypermedia systems comprise a generation of powerful tools to meet the demands of the new information globalization era. The most promising of such systems have characteristics that allow for the easy adaptation both to an, actually, unpredictable technological evolution and to the constantly evolving information needs of users. Such systems are generally known as Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS). Recently, research effort has been focused on the formulation of a solid set of OHS standards (i.e., protocols, reference models and architectures) that would stem from a common understanding and thus, direct future implementations. Unfortunately, sophisticated hypermedia notions like composite nodes and dynamic linking, still found in older, monolithic hypermedia systems, have been overlooked or roughly portrayed. This paper presents a distributed system architecture implemented on top of a hypermedia model for OHS, which captures notions like these and sets the foundation for straightforward implementations. The proposed hypermedia model comprises a Hypermedia Data Model, which is extensible and fulfils a series of OHS requirements, and a Structural Model, which ensures controlled hyperdocument construction and flexible dynamic linking. Aspects of a prototype hypermedia server (Aristotle), which has been the testbed for this architecture, are discussed.