As We May Link: A General Metamodel for Hypermedia Systems

Many hypermedia models have been proposed, including those specifically developed to model navigational aspects of web sites. But few hypermedia systems have been implemented based on metamodelling principles familiar to the database community. Often there is no clear separation between conceptual and technical issues in the models and their implementations are not based on an explicit representation of a metamodel. This results in a loss of generality and uniformity across systems. Based on principles of metamodel-driven system development, we have implemented a platform that can support various categories of hypermedia systems through the generality and extensibility of the metamodel. We present our metamodel and show how it generalises concepts present in a range of hypermedia and link server systems.